View from the Chair: Celebrating good practice in dental education; annual renewal; welcoming our new registrant Council member

Celebrating good practice in dental education

Every year, around 8,500 students take up places in the UK to train to become dental professionals. We set the standards for undergraduate and specialty training and quality assure education providers against these standards. This is important work – it means that students are well prepared for their future careers in dentistry and patients can be confident they will receive the highest level of dental care. The nature of our responsibility here means that a lot of focus is on risk and challenge. It was therefore very positive to bring together education providers and awarding bodies from across the UK to a ‘Good Practice’ event in July.

There was a diverse range of topics, including examples of how building professional behaviours into clinical assessment gives students the chance to reflect and reform. It was really good to hear the emphasis on wellbeing and pastoral support for students, and how real patient voices are being used to help students understand how inclusion barriers shape oral health across generations.

Technology and AI in education seem to go hand-in-hand, with examples shared of digital assessment processes for dental nurses and bespoke learning tools for dental technology students. We also heard about electronic portfolio systems being used to triangulate feedback and support students to develop professional behaviours.

Our Education Quality Assurance team really enjoyed the opportunity to hear more about the excellent work that providers are doing and to share this learning with everyone who attended.

Supporting dental care professionals through their annual renewal

We took steps in July to acknowledge the issues that some dental care professionals (DCPs) were experiencing with the online registration and renewal system, MyGDC, and to provide further guidance and help about how to use the system for the first time to renew registration.

The vast majority of DCPs renewed without any issues but in the weeks before the deadline we had reports of some people having trouble with resetting their password or seeing the right information in their account. We shared more detailed guidance and an explainer video with the professional associations and online. It’s fair to say that we had to work through a high volume of enquiries and, even after increasing the capacity of our customer service team, some people had to wait too long for us to respond.

MyGDC is a new online service and, as can happen with any new system, we saw some issues. It was therefore only right and proper that we then took the step to reassure DCPs that anyone who was struggling to renew their registration through MyGDC would not be removed from the register, provided they got in touch with us before the deadline.

Our Chief Executive, Tom Whiting, thanked the professional associations who explained the issues their members were facing. This insight helped us to better understand what DCPs were experiencing and to respond.

Every year, around 3,500 DCPs do not renew their registration for a variety of reasons such as voluntary removal, non-payment, retirement and, sadly, when we have been informed that a dental professional has died. We are now working through the list of those who contacted us to let us know that they wanted to renew their registration but had difficulties in doing so, and we will publish figures of the number of DCPs on the register shortly, as we do every year.

Welcoming our new Council member

I am very pleased to welcome Urshla Devalia (Oosh) as our new registrant Council member from 1 October. With experience in clinical care, policy development and system leadership, Oosh brings a strong set of skills and experience which will complement those of our existing Council members.

Of course, a welcome often coincides with a goodbye, and we will also then say farewell to Simon Morrow, our Senior Independent Council member who also serves on the Audit and Risk Committee. I particularly appreciated the benefit of Simon’s knowledge and wisdom when I joined the GDC less than one year ago and we will all miss his pragmatism and good humour at Council.