If you are a Dental Care Professional (DCP), you need to renew your registration and make your training and indemnity declarations by the relevant deadlines. Not doing so, or only partially doing so will put your registration at risk. Dentists should also remind their staff to undertake the necessary steps for renewal.
Payment
Pay the Annual Retention Fee (ARF) by 31 July at the latest, and make your indemnity declaration as part of this process. Do not be caught out by any issue with your practice not making the payment correctly, or the payment not going through from your own account, which can happen. If you pay annually by card, check the payment has gone through. If you pay by annual or quarterly direct debit, this payment should have already gone out, so confirm that it has been received by the GDC.
Reminders
Any payment reminders via email, SMS or letter that you get from the GDC between now and the end of July mean that your ARF has not been received. They are not general information emails to all registrants.
Check your spam email folders to double check that you are not missing any reminders.
Your recorded CPD
Check what CPD you have declared to the GDC through the eGDC portal, and ensure that you have earned enough verifiable hours by 31 July to comply with the requirements. If you do not have enough, you will need to undertake some urgently, because CPD completed after 31 July will not count towards the total for this year. Your CPD declaration needs to be made by 28 August at the latest.
If you are in the final year of your CPD cycle and you do not have enough hours, you can apply for an eight-week grace period via your eGDC account. For this, you must submit a request by 31 July.
Required hours
Make sure that you declare a minimum of 10 hours between your declaration for last year, and your declaration for this year. That means if you declared 2 hours last summer, you must declare at least 8 hours this summer. Being on a career break or maternity leave does not change this requirement.
If you are at the end of your cycle, ensure that you declare the required hours for your registrant category. For dental nurses and dental technicians, this is 50 hours over the last five years. For dental hygienists, dental therapists, clinical dental technicians and orthodontic therapists it is 75 hours. Even if you comply with the total number of required hours, you must still also comply with the 10-hour rule outlined above. That rule also applies between cycles – that is, if your last cycle ended last year and you declared 7 hours in 2023, you need to declare at least 3 hours this year.
The importance of doing this correctly and punctually
Every year, some registrants are deregistered due to non-payment of the ARF before the deadline.
You cannot pay the registration fee after 23:59 on 31 July because that is when the payment system closes. Then people who miss this deadline are deregistered, have to stop working from 1 August and go through a restoration process. This involves putting together a full application pack and having it assessed by the GDC.
All of this is a highly involved administrative process. While the official GDC processing time is around 15 working days, it often takes longer, especially if the application is not complete or there are other administrative issues. In addition to this, leaving the register, even involuntarily, means that your indemnity arrangements cease.
The GDC has published a blog to provide further information about the pitfalls of not complying.
What we are doing to improve this process
On multiple occasions we have highlighted to the GDC the devastating professional, financial and mental health ramifications of being deregistered. We have also pointed to the significant loss of patient care, but so far there have not been any changes apart from an easier way to declare CPD compliance in certain circumstances.
For this reason, we emphasise the importance of making sure that your ARF payment has gone through and that you are making the required learning and indemnity declarations.
Voluntary collection of workforce data
We encourage registrants to take part in the GDC’s voluntary collection of workforce data, because the data collected at the end of 2023 was deemed helpful in informing future workforce policy considerations.
Data collection takes the form of a short survey with additional questions during your renewals process. The questions cover the work that you undertake as registered dental professionals.
This process has scope to give the clearest impression of the challenges facing the UK-wide dental workforce. The regulator has assured us that the data will not be used to identify individuals and will be published anonymously. Previous dentist datasets were published earlier this year.