GDP Fights GDC To Reveal The Facts - Conflicting Statements From The Regulator
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- Published: Monday, 24 October 2022 08:15
- Written by Chris Tapper
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The General Dental Council has indicated that it won’t be revealing full details of whether Fitness to Practise investigations have been taken against registrants as a result of its monitoring of media and social media.
In August, GDPUK reported fears that the General Dental Council may be monitoring the social media posts of registrants had been confirmed as fact as a result of a Freedom of Information request made by Leeds-based GDP Dr Dominic O’Hooley.
The four-year-old Freedom of Information request by Dr O’Hooley was recently highlighted on Twitter. The response from the GDC revealed that the regulator DOES monitor social media accounts.
The GDP’s enquiries found that the GDC was using the services of an external monitoring company called Gorkana Group, which now trades as Cision, between November 2016 and May 2021 .
Conflicting Answers
The GDC told Dr O’Hooley in 2018 that “It has no social media monitoring policy and we do not target individuals or individuals’ social media accounts."
But earlier in August, when Dr O’Hooley asked if any registered dental professional had had FTP proceedings initiated against them due to information gained from the GDC social media monitoring team, the GDC repeated “The GDC does not have a social media monitoring team and therefore no fitness to practise proceedings have been initiated on the basis of information they have obtained.”
However, the latest reply to a follow-up FOI request from Dr O’Hooley shows that despite its earlier assertion, the GDC doesn’t actually know for certain, if any FTP investigations have been launched against registrants as a result of social media monitoring.
The GDC wrote “After liaising with our FtP team, there are no cases that we are aware of which have used information from GorkanaGroup (sic) as part of a (sic) FtP investigation against any registrant.”
“To fully confirm this, we would need to manually check each case from 2016 to 2021 to see whether any information was provided from GorkanaGroup as a part of the investigation as there are no informant type set up on our Customer Relations Management (CRM) system as GorkanaGroup. As such, we would need to search all cases.”
The GDC then went on to quote Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act, “Which allows a public authority to decline a request for information where it estimates that it would exceed the appropriate limit to locate, extract, and/or retrieve the information requested.”
The GDC said “The appropriate limit for the DC is 18 hours or £450. The estimate must be reasonable in the circumstances of the case.”
“We estimate that it would take at least ten minutes to review each case that was referred to an assessment between 2016 and 2021.Between 2016 to 2021 there were 6.739 relevant cases. These would require 1,123 hours to review. In 2021 alone, there were 869 cases which would require 145 hours to review.”
The GDC added in its response to Dr O’Hooley “If there is a specific timeframe of a couple of months that you would like us to search, we can carry the search if this does not go beyond the appropriate time limit stated above, i.e. from June 2019 to September 2019.”
Dr O’Hooley also asked the GDC “During the time of the contract with GorkanaGroup, was the GDC aware of any instances where they used proxy, fake or otherwise under guise tactics to gain information on registered dental professionals or groups within the sphere of social media?”
Dr O’Hooley’s question followed previous FOI requests he had made regarding the GDC’s much criticised use of private investigators during FTP investigations.
In 2021 The General Dental Council admitted to Dental Protection in the High Court that it acted ‘unlawfully in undertaking an under-guise operation without reasonable justification.’
The regulator told Dr O’Hooley “The GDC is not aware of any time when GorkanaGroup used a proxy at any point during the contract, also we do not believe this is a service which is offered by the supplier.”
The GDP also asked “Were any named dental professional’s details given to GorkanaGroup by the GDC for the purposes of gaining information pertaining to their social media activity?”
The regulator responded “The GDC is not aware of any time when GorkanaGroup used a proxy at any point during the contract, also we do not believe this is a service which is offered by the supplier.”
“No named dental professionals were referred from the GDC to GorkanaGroup for the purpose of gaining information pertaining to the dental professional’s social media activity however this is a service that they do offer.”
The regulator had also previously failed to answer Dr O’Hooley’s question as to whether any Annual Retention Fee money had been used to fund social media monitoring services.
The GDC replied “Regarding the payments for the social monitoring provisions, outside of Overseas Registration Exams and first registration fees, the GDC does not ringfence our income streams. The service will have been paid for from our operating income which is set out in detail within note 2 of our Annual Report and Accounts which includes the annual retention fee.”
As reported by GDPUK in September, the cost of “Traditional media monitoring and social media monitoring” incurred a combined cost of £8,330.
For the period that Gorkana Group was providing services, the total cost of monitoring for roughly four-and-a-half-years works out at an estimated £37,485.
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