The General Dental Council (GDC) is urging dental professionals to have their say on the draft version of a guidance document about advertising. The GDC wants to ensure that all information or publicity material such as flyers or adverts about dental services are legal, decent, honest and truthful.
The draft document can be found here- one area of controversy may be the advice that the courtesy title doctor should not be used as it could be misleading.
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The GDC’s ethical guidance ‘Standards for dental professionals’ sets expectations for registrants. The following are most relevant in relation to advertising:
Work within your knowledge, professional competence and physical abilities (1.3)
Do not make any claims which could mislead patients (1.10)
Justify the trust that your patients, the public and your colleagues have in you by always acting honestly and fairly (6.1)
The GDC wants to provide dental professionals with more detailed information on what is expected of them regarding advertising and is asking for views on the proposed guidance.
GDC Chair Alison Lockyer says: "This issue affects so many of our registrants. We often get queries from members of the public concerned or confused about the information they’ve seen. We plan to ask patients what they think, but we also need to know the views of those we regulate. We hope that dental professionals and other people linked to dentistry will take the time to tell us what they think."
The consultation looks at a number of issues including:
using specialist titles;
advertising the provision of dental appliances;
information which should be on dental professionals’ websites.
The consultation, which is open to everyone, can be found on www.gdc-uk.org and will run between 8 July and 1 October 2010.
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