GDC Publishes Review of Dental Education
- Details
- Published: Wednesday, 23 March 2022 19:57
- Written by Peter Ingle
- Hits: 1457
The GDC does more than just collect registration fees and run the FtP process.
From its inception in the 1950’s, a key GDC role was to ensure that dental schools were providing satisfactory training. To bring that up to 2022 language, the GDC “quality-assures dental education and training programmes in all four nations of the UK so that newly qualified dental professionals are fit to register with the GDC and practise independently as safe beginners.” Those involved in education for a while will recall the arrival of the “safe beginners” concept, which some felt recognised lower expectations of primary training courses.
The GDC has now published its report on two review periods, 2018/19 and 2019/20 to 2020/21. The old style visitations to dental schools have been thoroughly modernised. A new “risk-based QA process” was introduced in 2018/19. This is then used to decide the “scope, length and depth” of the actual inspection. The intention is that inspections are “efficient and targeted.” To practice managers this language and approach may be familiar from their dealings with the CQC.
The public, and practices lucky enough to have new registrants applying for jobs, will be relieved to know that “nearly all education programmes inspected in the two review periods reported on, were found to be satisfactory to enable the qualifying cohort of dental professionals to apply to join the GDC register and practice safely.” By way of further reassurance the GDC add that those that were unsatisfactory, had “a clear action plan of our expectations” to produce safe registrants.
Looking at the report summary’s provided, confirms that training dentists is becoming an increasingly peripheral interest of the GDC. Of 20 regular inspections in 2020 -2021 just 2 were for dentistry, in comparison there were 8 for hygiene and therapy. When it came to new programmes, dentistry accounted for 3 out of the total of 15 inspections.
The report refers to the GDC publication, “Standards for Education. Standards and requirements for providers.” These are: Standard 1 – Protecting patients, Standard 2 – Quality evaluation and review of the programme, and Standard 3 – Student assessment. Together these account for 21 requirements. A GDP reading these may observe a lack of interest in actual clinical training. Those items that do interest the GDC are generally assessed on the basis of policies provided, presumably submitted at the risk based QA stage of the process. It is not immediately apparent where attempts would be made to confirm that the policies provided bear any relation to actual procedures. In the world of the GDC this is an evidence based assessment. There are many bar graphs showing how the GDC’s requirements have been either, met, partly met or not met. Across the three GDC standards in 2020- 2021 the relevant percentages were, 71%, 26% and 3%, respectively. Those establishments only partly meeting or failing to meet standards are not identified. In contrast the report is interspersed with examples of what the GDC considers notably good practice. These are attributed. One example, from the Bristol BDS course: "A new process for dealing with student fitness to practice issues has been introduced. Multiple pieces of evidence about the process were provided to the panel who deemed the process to be robust. When triangulated, students reported that they have enjoyed the pastoral element introduced into the new process. The students also clearly understood the remit and purpose of the student referral system, which is part of the new process.”
One conclusion in the report is that, despite the pandemic the GDC‘s opinion from its 2020-2021 inspections was that “the quality of students becoming newly registered dental professionals remains the same as any other year.”
Dental teams can be confident that the GDC will continue to ensure high standards in dental education, their website summary concluding that “Where necessary, we will make changes to ensure our QA process remains agile and fit for purpose.”
You need to be logged in to leave comments.
Report