Dental Protection welcomes this opportunity to respond and give its support to the General Dental Council’s (GDC) proposals to remove registrants’ addresses from the online register.
The GDC is right to have concluded that while it should continue to require registrants to provide an address at which they can be contacted, the risk to registrants of the GDC continuing to publish those addresses outweigh any additional public interest in doing so. Dental Protection also welcomes the GDC’s acknowledgement that the profession is committed to taking steps to improve compliance, and make their unique registration number available to the public.
In the interest of protecting the public, all advertisements and marketing material – both print and online – should contain the name and unique registration number of all of the registrants at that address. As well as dentists, members of Dental Protection also include hygienists, orthodontic therapists, laboratory and clinical technicians, dental nurses and therapists.
Following the removal of registrants’ full addresses from the online register, it should not be replaced with the postal town of the registrant. There are many very small postal towns, which would allow the identification of an individual. This would defeat the objective of the change, which is to simply confirm that a particular individual is a registrant of the GDC. Dental Protection urges the GDC to consider this point.