LDC Annual Conference Report

LDC Annual Conference Report

13th June 2014

Manchester Deansgate

Paul, Agi and myself attended the conference on behalf of the West Sussex LDC. Tony Jacobs was chair and lead the proceedings, as well as an entertaining after dinner speech the previous night.

During the chairman’s opening address, Tony reiterated the important role that the conference has in shaping the GDPC agenda for the following year. He thanked us all for attending and our continued support of the conference.

This was followed by John Milne who gave an update on the GDPC. He discussed the responses to the 2013 conference motions (which are available from me, upon request). He also thanked all those who supported theBDA, GDPC and the conference. He explained what the GDPC had been doing over the year including the robust response to the CQC fining dental practices who failed to register managers with them. It was felt that the £4000 fine was disproportionate and was just dentists getting tied up with policy designed for nursing homes. In the majority of cases these fines were reimbursed. The GDPC will continue to negotiate with the CQC in achieving variable fees to be proportional to the size of the dental practice.

He will continue to fight the department of health’s efficiency savings for both salaried and GDPs explaining that dentistry has a tiny amount of waste and is already highly efficient. He will be working with the coming introduction of the tiers (level 1, 2, and 3) for the benefit of reducing inappropriate referrals and that at the moment there is no conclusion as to what these levels are.

Tony Jacobs asked for approval to the changes proposed to the standing orders for next year’s conference. It debated and arguments centred on whether every representative needed to be a dental registrant with the GDC. Some felt that this artificially limited the representatives who work within the LDC attending and others felt that it should only be dentists that make decisions for the benefit of other dentists. However, with very slight variation the standing orders and their variations were voted through.

There were 30 motions raised in this year’s conference, dealing with contract reform, occupational health, dentists with enhanced skills, an LDC award, referrals, performers lists, levy collection, dental software, CQC, commissioning policies, seniority payments, orthodontic contracts, contract monitoring, PDS plus, foundation training, general dental council, recalls, LDC federations and Local dental networks (the full list of motions for debate are available from me, upon request).

After coffee John Milne and Barry Cockcroft gave a brief presentation on the contract reform. John discussed how he was fighting to retain 2 core principles in which incentives to encourage and enable good practice are created and the practitioner should not be penalised for doing the right thing. Consideration is still around 3 subsections being capitation, activity and quality. This was followed by Barry who confirmed that all parties are committed to contract reform, including the recent feedback from the national “call to action”. This has been followed up with 4 papers that have been recently published on the NHS England website, which are for everyone to read and you are able to give your feedback to them online.

Although both speakers were entertaining it was felt that neither of them brought an new information to our attention.

This was followed by a presentation of dentists with enhanced skills by Barry Cockcroft and Eddie Crouch. It appears that tiers will be introduced with or without contract reform and are likely to be in place for April 2015. Routine treatment, expected of every dentist will be level 1. The level 3 is specialist services, leaving level 2 to be dentists with enhanced skills. Dental education will be focused at all three levels, such that level one will be supported. It was felt that at present there is next to no training available for a level one dentist within the faculty. These levels will be part of the new pathways, which include the overall lifetime approach, restorative, orthodontic and oral surgery (to name a few). These will be organised by referrals via a referral management service.

During the election section of the conference, a new chair elect for 2015/16 was appointed in Nick Stolls, Tim Harker will remain as treasurer, 2 honorary auditors to conference were appointed, a 3 year and 1 year conference agenda committee representative were voted in, a new GDPC rep was previously submitted and subsequently approved. Lastly a new representative to the board of managers of the guild was appointed.

After lunch Tim confirmed the accounts of last year. This was followed by the British Dental Guild, dentists’ health support trust and BDA benevolent fund all putting their case across for why they want our money.

Late the afternoon there was a lively debate of the future of orthodontics (hosted by Alisdair McKendrick) and whether orthodontics has no place in primary dental care, unless part of a multidisciplinary team. With many parties arguing for and against this consideration, it was concluded that this should not be offered as a solution to the department of health, as they would likely use this as an excuse to cut funding while blaming dentists on turning on themselves. No voting was undertaken after the debate and it was felt to be more for the fun of the discussion that achieving any outcome.

To close the conference the new chairman for 2014/2015 was inducted into post and he gave his closing remarks.

Toby Hancock