GDC Chair sees rising level of dental complaints
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- Published: Wednesday, 18 June 2014 15:56
- Written by News Editor
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Bill Moyes, chair of General Dental Council (GDC) has delivered the Malcolm Pendlebury Lecture at the Faculty of General Dental Practice. He said that the volume of patients complaints about poor dentistry is likely to increase. At the same time the GDC will be under pressure to deal with more fitness to practise cases.
Bill Moyes said: ‘As a relative newcomer to both the dental sector and professional regulation, four things seem clear to me:
- The exposure of failure and bad performance will not reduce, it will increase. And the volume and intensity of patients’ complaints about quality and safety is also unlikely to reduce very much, if at all, although it may fluctuate;
- The GDC, like all professional regulators, will continue to be under strong and growing pressure to tackle more fitness to practise cases, faster and to come down harder on unsafe or poor quality care, or unacceptable behaviour; and
- A concerted effort is required by the sector itself and by its various regulators and commissioners to prevent fitness to practise cases arising and to give patients better information about the performance of individual practitioners and better and faster redress mechanisms. A fitness to practise case shouldn’t be the only remedy on offer, or even the most common one.
- Service users will become increasingly consumerist in their outlook – many already are - and so the pressure will not lessen for services to be designed around the needs of patients and for care to be delivered in ways that patients are happy with. If anything, it will increase.’
The full text of his speech is available on the GDC website:
Number of complaints will increase .. - how to pro
Recently we organized a lecture with a person from GDC fitness to practise team. He confirmed that this year had a record number of claims against dentists. The lecture was mainly about how to protect yourself from such claims and about the GDC new standards (and will be repeated on 19 July in Manchester).I think that such a big rise in complaints is partly because of many companies advertising "no win no fee" services for dental claims. They are also very easy to find on the internet, with "specialist dental negligence teams" advertising how much money they got for claims... In my opinion, sadly the number of claims will continue to rise, the same with membership fees for defence organizations and GDC.
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