The government plans to register all dental professionals – including dentists, nurses, hygienist, therapists, dental technicians and orthodontic therapists with the Care Quality Commission (CQC) by April 1, 2011.
The CQC will act as a watchdog for dental professionals. The health and social care watchdog was set up by Labour in 2009.
This has been labelled ‘a waste of time’ by dental law experts and will amount to unnecessary duplication of what the GDC already have in place.
Chris Dean of the Dental Law Partnership said:
“It is not likely to produce any significant improvement in patient safety or treatment outcomes, yet will increase the administrative and financial burden of both individual practitioners, the CQC and, ultimately, on central government. It would therefore be an unnecessary and wasteful use of significant resources.”
For more information about the CQC and registering with the CQC:
http://www.cqc.org.uk/_db/_documents/CQC-GDC_MoU.pdf
http://www.cqc.org.uk/_db/_documents/CQC-GDC_MoU.pdf