GDC Announce Changes at FTP
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- Published: Wednesday, 02 August 2023 08:19
- Written by Peter Ingle
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There has been another low key yet important announcement about Fitness to Practice (FTP) from the GDC. Last time around it was about the long awaited analysis of the cause of death of the 16 registrants who died during their Fitness to Practice proceedings between 2019 and 2021.
Despite previous assurances, it was quietly let out that this would not be coming as promised in the first half of 2023. That news which was accompanied by the abandonment of any target date, came from Stefan Czerniawski who is GDC Executive Director, Strategy, while the latest announcement, unusually, is uncredited. Neither came from John Cullinane who became Executive Director, Fitness to Practise in March 2020. Both men are members of the five strong GDC Executive Team.This may be because the GDC have now announced a major reorganisation. The fitness to practice and registration directorates are to be combined in to a new Regulation directorate. The GDC claim this will “enhance our resilience and efficiency and improve recruitment, flexibility and career development for staff.” The career development aspect is an interesting one as the new ‘super directorate’ will be led by a new recruit, who will join this September.
This will be a big job at the GDC, in their words: “This newly created role is a significant and influential senior leadership position and will be responsible for a large part of our operation, specifically the core regulatory functions of Registration, Fitness to Practise and Hearings, leading a multi-disciplinary team of over 110 people.”
It would appear that the GDC did not identify suitable talent for this post within the organisation, the new Executive director being Theresa Thorp who comes from the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS). She is a qualified Advocate and in her six years at the organisation has most recently been the RICS Director, Regulation Enforcement & Governance. Prior to this she was at the Crown Prosecution Service for nine years.
The persistent shortcomings of the GDC’s FTP process are well documented and indeed the GDC has consistently failed to meet its own regulators basic standards on this. To date in every single report or assessment by the Professional Standards Authority the GDC has failed at least one of the standards for FTP.
It is if anything, well overdue that the GDC have decided to make major changes at FTP. Low points in the last three years include the disastrous Williams and Charnley cases. These were compounded by the GDC’s attempts to try and overturn court judgements, which so singularly failed to achieve the “clarity” which the GDC had given as its justification for the proceedings. Along with increasing concern about the lack of relevant expertise repeatedly displayed by its favoured expert witnesses, there is also the ongoing scandal regarding registrant suicides during FTP, with the GDC managing to make the GMC look compassionate.
According to the GDC, the former FTP supremo, John Cullinane, “will take his extensive knowledge and experience to lead our Hearings Service, including the Dental Professionals Hearing Service which launched last year.”
In familiar GDC style the whole announcement is headlined, “New executive leadership of fitness to practise and registration at the GDC.” It finishes with a quote from Ian Brack, GDC CEO and Registrar: “Our overarching objective is protection of the public. To do this, one of our most important tasks is to ensure integrity of the register of dental professionals, including who should and should no longer be on that register. Bringing together registration and fitness to practise into a single function brings the unified approach needed to ensure that we deliver our regulatory purpose efficiently and effectively.”Registrants will hope that Theresa Thorp can indeed bring some much needed efficiency and effectiveness to the GDC.
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