The General Dental Council (GDC) has published a report on dental professionals who have died while fitness to practise (FtP) concerns were investigated or remediated.

The report is the first of its kind for the GDC and covers a four-year period from 2019 to 2022. During this time, 20 dental professionals died while their cases were active, with causes of death categorised as natural, external, or unspecified, and one subcategory of suicide. The GDC has taken steps to ensure that individuals cannot be identified.

The report has included deaths in the subcategory of suicide when “suicide” was listed on the death certificate or notification. By convention, death certificates in Scotland and Northern Ireland do not use the word “suicide” or any synonym of it. Deaths that occurred overseas have been categorised as unspecified.

Toby Harris, chair of the GDC, said, “The report serves as a call for everyone in the dental sector to reflect on the environment, systems and processes involved in being a dental professional. It took longer than we expected to complete the work and some of the issues have been complex, but we have delivered process improvements in parallel and taken care to ensure we can be confident in the data reported.

“Every death is a tragedy, and when the data and what we are doing to improve FtP are put aside, what is left is the death of people, some in tragic circumstances, and we must consider the families, loved ones and colleagues for whom the pain and hurt are still very raw. We offer them our condolences.”

The GDC has prioritised improvements to its FtP process to minimise the significant negative health and wellbeing impacts of investigations on dental professionals. Improvements include revised communications and staff training. The regulator is piloting the use of initial inquiries to enable the assessment of clinical practice concerns earlier in the process and improve timeliness.

Rachael Bell, head of dental at MDDUS, said, “More work needs done to improve the quality of communication in the early stages and to minimise communication errors, which can lead to unnecessary stress to registrants.

“Further work is also needed to prevent the weaponising of the GDC by informants and to minimise the health impacts on an already stretched dental workforce.”

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