2019 Dental Professionals Survey now open to all registrants

GDC Research Manager, Guy Rubin, talks about the 2019 Dental Professionals Survey, which is currently open.

Evidence in regulation

The GDC is committed to using research to build an evidence base to inform its policy and practice.

When we are deciding our approach, or developing policy, relating to a whole range of issues, we need to be confident that we are working with up-to-date information.

One way we do this is through an independent survey of dental professionals that we commission every year.

What's in the survey?

Each year we ask a selection of questions which remain largely unchanged year-to-year. This provides a good benchmark of views amongst dental professionals and enables us to understand where progress may have been made.

When there are emerging issues, we also ask new questions designed to provide us with a better understanding of what professionals think about these too.

The 2019 survey takes around 15 minutes to complete and seeks to explore:

• how well the GDC's role, purpose and work is understood
• topical issues affecting the profession, such as CPD
• how complaints and feedback are handled locally/in practice
• perception of fitness to practise.

2019 survey now open to all professionals – look out for your invite!

As in previous years, we began the 2019 survey by inviting a cross section of dental professionals to participate. However, following requests from professionals to widen the survey, and to ensure the results are as robust as possible, we have now opened the survey up everyone on the registers.

With this in mind, some professionals will already have received their email inviting them to take part, and others will be receiving their invites shortly.

When you receive your invite, we would encourage you complete the survey so that you can help us to better understand the key issues affecting your work. This, in turn, helps us to make informed choices when making decisions in our work, which is ultimately in everyone's interests.

The importance of independence

To ensure we get a true and robust picture, we always appoint an independent organisation to carry out this survey on our behalf.

What this also means is that when professionals are giving their answers, they can have absolute confidence that they are doing so anonymously.

This year, the survey is being conducted by research provider, Pye Tait Consulting.

So… once again, we would really like professionals to tell us their views by clicking on the link in their email to complete the survey.​