Today the General Dental Council announced that it is significantly increasing the price dental professionals pay for regulation. The Press Release issued this afternoon explained that the GDC is facing a number of significant challenges which look set to continue in 2011. A number of these will place additional pressure on its resources. In particular:
- A 40% rise in fitness to practise (FtP) case load overall
- An increase in hearings. 178 cases were referred to a Practice Committee in 2009 in comparison to 164 in 2008
- The cost of legal and professional services now stands at more than £8,000,000 per annum
This rise in caseload reflects an increase in FTP allegations, which means that the costs of dealing with complaints about dentistry has risen significantly over the past few years.
Most dental professionals are never involved in FTP cases, but for the few that are the process is long and stressful. The best solution is, of course, not to have complaints escalate to that level and to resolve them locally.
At Training to Achieve we have been developing our expertise in dental complaints training for some years now. Most of our training is provided at the dental practice where we work directly with the team in helping them with their approach for complaints resolution. We have a number of useful lessons to share. We thought it would be great to put these into a report to help dental practices. We are putting the final touches to this report now and it will be titled:
Dental Complaints: Five essential strategies to ensure your complaints resolution is successful
This report is being prepared to assist dentists and their practices manage complaints well. It highlights a range of useful, pragmatic and implementable strategies to help dental professionals manage their complaints handling effectively. To pre-order your copy of this report email me at alison@trainingtoachieveenterprises.com
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