Ex-dentist carried on working despite erasure
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- Published: Tuesday, 29 August 2017 07:55
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A former dentist treated 1,500 patients while she was unregistered the GDC told a magistrates court. Eleni Kalamara pleaded guilty to five charges of carrying out dentistry illegally following an investigation and prosecution by regulators the General Dental Council. She was fined £500 for each offence, £2,500 in total, and ordered to pay court costs of £2,218.
Eleni Kalamara was registered to practise as a dentist in the UK with the GDC in September 2004. But she was removed from the register in April 2015, because she did not meet the requirements of the Continued Professional Development scheme. But she continued to work at My Dentist in Warrington. She is now believed to be in Greece and pleaded guilty to the charges at North Cheshire magistrates’ court.
The General Dental Council believes Kalamara treated 1,502 patients – including 392 children – in total between April 2015 and January 2016 whilst unregistered and without insurance. The charges related to ‘dental procedures of varying complexity’ performed on five separate patients, including children, in 2015.
At the time the five charged offences were committed Kalamara was living in Manchester. There’s no suggestion any patients she treated suffered any adverse reaction, but the GDC told magistrates she was ‘unprofessional and unethical’ and ‘had dismissed her professional obligations’.
Shaun Round, interim head of illegal practice at the GDC, said: “The General Dental Council’s role is to protect patients and help to ensure the public has confidence in the services the dental profession provides and we do this by regulating the dental team. We also prosecute people who carry out dentistry illegally. Even though Ms Kalamara has previously trained, qualified and worked as a dentist, she was removed from the register of dental professionals for not completing her Continued Professional Development – a statutory requirement for all dental professionals, which involves keeping your skills and knowledge up to date.”
A spokesman for My Dentist, said: "During our annual checks we discovered Dr Eleni Kalamara’s GDC registration had lapsed because she had not registered her continuing professional development and we terminated her employment (sic). The GDC usually communicates with an employer as well as a dentist when issues like this arise but Dr Kalamara gave incorrect employer information to the GDC so they were unable to inform us of this lapse.
My Dentist continued: “We have been assisting the regulator with their investigation and we are introducing monthly GDC registration checks across our practices. We’re very disappointed Dr Kalamara breached our trust and that of our patients and would like to reassure them we acted swiftly, properly and with their care in mind.”
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