eGDCWhat's different?
We are now consulting on our next corporate strategy.
You will find below a summary of what is new and different in our proposals.
Consultation on our next corporate strategy
We are proposing a new vision and mission
We have considered the challenges the dental team is facing, our own performance and what needs to happen if things are to change. We recognise the need to do more to support those who deliver dental care, and to get better at responding to changes in the way dental care is accessed and delivered.
Dentistry is changing, and we need to change with it.
What has not changed is our public protection role, and we will continue to uphold high professional standards and work to maintain public safety and confidence. Our plans aim to progress our current approach to supporting professionalism and fostering learning while improving the way we regulate.
Our vision: Good oral health for all.
Our mission: Through trusted and effective regulation, we will support dental professionals to provide the right care for their patients.
We will be led by our values as we deliver our plans by being respectful, transparent, inclusive and purposeful.
Modernising our registration and renewal services
Our registration and renewal services need updating, and we will need to invest to modernise our systems and processes. Our processes continue to heavily rely on paper-based submissions, can be time consuming and confusing for some.
We plan to make registration and renewal more efficient:
- enabling digital and online interfaces, where possible
- addressing inefficiencies, and
- making sure they are fully accessible.
Reducing the unintended impacts of fitness to practise
We have learnt a lot about the negative unintended impacts that our fitness to practise investigations can have on the health and wellbeing of participants, and how the climate of fear is affecting patient care.
We must investigate serious concerns about the practice, behaviour and health of dental professionals to maintain patient safety and public confidence in the professions we regulate, but we want to thinking differently about how we achieve that objective while avoiding the negative effects.
We plan to improve fitness to practise by:
- challenging our current position and exploring how, within our current legislation, to use fitness to practise to manage risk more effectively
- exploring greater use of less adversarial approaches, such as remediation, to make the process less punitive and increase the potential for learning, and
- developing options for change.
Collaborating to create change
We believe that we need to think more broadly about what our role in promoting public health, safety and wellbeing means when faced with challenges such as access to NHS dentistry and growing oral health inequalities.
We want to use our position to help address issues that are affecting the public and patients. There is strength in numbers, so while being respectful of our different roles, we want to work with others to influence change.
We plan to work collaboratively to affect change by:
- ensuring we listen to diverse professional, patient and public voices
- gaining a better understand inequalities in access, patient experience and outcomes in oral health, including our role in helping to address them, and
- identifying ways in which the regulatory framework can be improved.