A view from the Chair: looking ahead to 2025

The start of the year is a traditional time for either looking back or looking ahead and this month I am going to look ahead to some of the priorities in 2025 for the GDC. 

There will be some changes in Council, as three people come to the end of their current terms of office in September, including my own role as Chair. Such turnover is a regular event in all large organisations and the GDC is no different. It is also always an opportunity to seek a diverse pool of candidates who bring new perspectives and experience, which should be welcomed. The recruitment will start soon and I encourage anyone with an interest in dental regulation to consider the roles. 

Revised education standards and guidance 

New guidance on reporting matters to the GDC comes into effect on 1 February. This brings together all reporting obligations — spanning health, criminal, and regulatory matters — into one place, helping professionals to more easily understand and meet the expectations that protect patient safety and public confidence in the profession.  

February is also the last opportunity to respond to our consultation into revised standards for education, which set out the requirements expected of all pre-registration programmes that lead to registration with the GDC. This is important work that aims to introduce new areas relevant to today’s dental education landscape and the consultation is open until 6 February.

Towards the end of last year, we received valuable feedback on the revised Scope of Practice guidance. Since then, we have been reviewing the feedback in depth, and meeting with those groups and organisations that provided feedback on specific issues within the guidance to discuss their points in greater detail. We will meet with stakeholders again to provide an overview of the guidance before it is published. I am grateful particularly to the professional associations and indemnifiers for their input on this important topic. 

Continuing to improve fitness to practice (FtP)  

Improving FtP processes wherever we can remains a firm priority for the GDC. We know that investigations take a long time and can cause stress and anxiety. Changes made in recent years help, and we have firm plans in place to do more.  

We will continue to review decision-making guidance to improve proportionality, fairness and consistency in fitness to practise outcomes. Updated Guidance for the Interim Orders Committee took effect last year. This year, we will publish the outcome of our consultation on guidance for practice committees which closed in September 2024, and also look at case management improvements that we can make in 2025. 

We will be reviewing our processes where there are sexual misconduct allegations and identifying opportunities for reducing the impact on participants in such cases. 

Plans are in development to improve the communication and practical support offered to those who participate in investigations and hearings. We are mindful of the need to consider the wider context and impacts of investigations, such as issues relating to employment, and that feelings of stress and anxiety are likely to be experienced from the moment a dental professional has been notified that an investigation has been opened. 

We are also committed to learning from any death that occurs while concerns are being investigated or remediated. We are exploring serious incident review processes and we want to be able to identify any opportunities for learning quickly, and have a process in place that ensures any resulting recommendations are implemented and reviewed. Any review process needs to have the family, friends and colleagues of the dental professionals involved at the centre. The aim is to listen to those who have been affected and take steps to reduce the risk of harm.  

Continuing our focus on registration 

We will continue the positive work on registration performance that we saw last year and was recognised by the PSA. Joining the register is one of the most significant moments in a dental professional’s career, and we take our responsibility here very seriously. 

We want to remove friction from the process where we can and are developing work to reduce the reliance on paper submissions for registration applications in 2025. For candidates who qualified outside the UK, the procurement exercise to find suppliers and increased capacity for the Overseas Registration Examination (ORE) is approaching the final stages. We expect to announce the outcome in Spring and commit to keeping ORE candidates fully informed of what this means for them. 

Council also recently decided to approve a policy to provide eligible candidates with refugee status priority access to book a place on the ORE. Expect to see details of this shortly. 

Consulting on the corporate strategy 

In May, we expect to bring forward proposals for consultation on the GDC’s Corporate Strategy from 2026 to 2028. This is a very important opportunity to set the direction and priorities for dental professional regulation, as well as providing the basis for setting the level of the Annual Retention Fee (ARF) over the strategy period. 

While our primary focus is on the next three years, we will also be looking further ahead to 2030, so that we can be confident that the choices we make for the new strategy are consistent with our objectives for effective regulation in the longer term. That will also allow us to take account of the potential longer-term impacts of the changes we make within the three-year strategy period, while recognising that inevitably we cannot predict the future with certainty.  

I have consistently been stressing the importance of legislative reform as an enabler of better regulation, and we will be continuing to press the government to make the changes we need to legislation which would enable us to make faster progress to more effective regulation. 

Our priority remains the same – to ensure that our approach to regulation protects patients and supports dental professionals. Central to our strategy will be close working with partners and stakeholder organisations to build trust in effective regulation and achieve a goal that we all share, which is patient safety and public confidence in the dental professions. 

So we will consider responses to the consultation very carefully before Council adopts the final version of the strategy, ready to take effect in January 2026. 

Thank you 

These are just some of the priorities ahead for the GDC. I would like to thank stakeholders for providing insight and information that allows us to keep improving dental regulation. 

And on behalf of the GDC I thank dental professionals for the essential work you do to deliver oral healthcare to patients across the UK in what continue to be challenging circumstances to meet patients’ needs and expectations. 

I look forward to the year ahead, working together to build trust and deliver effective regulation that keeps patients safe and the public confident in dental professionals.