John Makin explores the GDC’s revised CPD guidance documents and the impact these changes will have on dental professionals.
A crucial part of being a dental professional is to identify your learning and development needs in a personal development plan. Your CPD should be the most appropriate needed to achieve these aims and your plan should specify the timeframes involved. When chosen well, CPD can boost your confidence, strengthen your professional credibility and help you tackle and resolve issues and dilemmas.
The minimum number of verifiable CPD hours across your five-year cycle depends on your GDC registration. For dentists, this is a minimum of 100 hours. For dental therapists, dental hygienists, orthodontic therapists and clinical dental technicians, it is a minimum of 75 hours and for dental nurses and dental technicians, the minimum amount is 50 hours.
However, in March, the GDC updated its CPD scheme for registrants to ensure it is more accessible and flexible for dental professionals, especially when undertaking, recording, and submitting CPD. There are a few key areas that the DDU believes dental professionals should be particularly aware of.
Why Dentistry CPD?
- Manage your own GDC CPD cycle from start to finish
- Dedicated support team here to help at any time
- Log in any time anywhere to complete CPD hours at your leisure
- Access 650+ CPD courses, including all recommended topics
- Watch 300+ Dentistry Webinars on demand
- Team reports let you see how your practice is doing with their CPD requirements
- Easily assign licenses to members of your team
- Content specifically designed for every clinical member of the dental team.
To sign up, visit cpd.dentistry.co.uk.
Dentistry CPD hotline: 01923 851777 Email: cpdsupport@fmc.co.uk.
Grace period
Firstly, the GDC is proactively increasing awareness of the 56-day grace period for registrants who have been unable for good reasons to complete all CPD requirements before the end of their five-year cycle. The DDU welcomes this as we have had a number of members who did not meet the CPD requirement and were unaware of the ability to request a grace period. Awareness of the grace period may have prevented these members from ending up in difficulties with the GDC.
It should be noted however that this grace period can only be requested in the last six months of the five-year cycle and, crucially, the GDC are unable to agree to it after the cycle has ended.
Changes to certification information
Next, there is a reduction in the information that is required to appear on CPD certificates. Dental professionals are no longer required to provide a registration number or a signature from the CPD provider to confirm that the information provided is full and accurate.
However, the GDC does state it requires a statement that the information is full and correct on the certificate or via an email from the CPD provider. Signatures from a CPD provider are no longer required on a participant’s mapping document, again an email can be used as confirmation saving time and admin for individual dental professionals.
Regular CPD review
Registrants should regularly review their CPD throughout their five-year cycle to ensure that they are meeting all of the GDC’s requirements so as to hopefully avoid an issue at the end. As a reminder, not only do registrants need to ensure that they have completed the required number of verifiable hours across the five-year cycle, they also need to ensure that they do not fall foul of the requirement to complete 10 hours of verifiable CPD across each two-year period.
This rule applies within each five-year cycle, but also between cycles so that 10 hours of CPD must be completed across the last year of one cycle and the first year of the next. This is a point that in our experience registrants often miss with what can be very serious consequences.
In 2024, the GDC published guidance confirming that the registrar has a discretion not to erase a registrant for not completing their CPD requirements, but this discretion will only be exercised in exceptional circumstances.
As such registrants should take steps to ensure that their CPD requirements are met and if they think they are likely to be in difficulties with this, ask the GDC to agree to a grace period before the end of their five-year cycle.
CPD topics
The GDC’s website also contains guidance on recommended CPD topics for the different groups of registrants, this includes legal and ethical issues. It is important that you know which of the recommended topics are relevant to you and that they are incorporated into your personal development plan.
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