My Time on Dental Council... with Professor Phil Taylor
RCSEd Communications Team
As Dental Council nominations are open, RCSEd’s Dean of the Faculty of Dental Surgery Professor Philip Taylor provides his insights on the benefits of joining the Dental Council.
What’s it all about?
The Dental Council is the very heartbeat of the Dental Faculty – it is the decision-making hub of everything that goes on. It is a very welcoming place for the new arrival. We are very keen to have a broad church of people on the Council to represent the profession from several angles.
Each of the membership is elected Member by you, so it is – just like in parliament in the UK – a truly democratic body. As Dean, I expect because each person has been elected that they contribute to the Faculty and report their work activity at each of the Council Meetings.
What do we do?
We meet 4 times a year, with two of the meetings face-to-face in Edinburgh at the College. Of course, we could call extraordinary meetings, but even during the COVID pandemic this was not necessary. We look at reports from Education, Exams, the Patient Safety Committee, the Trainee’s Representative, international activity, and any issues raised by executive from the meetings with the Specialist Advisory and Advisory Boards.
The way the meeting is conducted is to encourage open debate, followed by a democratic vote which might lead to change or a request to fact find and review at the next meeting. We provide the Dental Faculties’ views on external reviews or requests for information. We challenge on behalf of the profession what we think might be damaging proposed changes at every level of our interests. It is the role of the Council to ratify any new Fellow or Member and any new examiners.
It's not all hard work though, and we have several formal dinners a year. The one which stands out is the final of the undergraduate skills competition, where we welcome a dental student from every one of the UK dental schools to Edinburgh for a fun day of competition.
Should you, and can you, apply to join?
You should think not ‘should I or can I apply’, but ‘how do I apply to join?’. Yes, YOU! We are keen to have more recent Fellows on the council, as we do not want this to be a stale body of end-of-career dentists but the voice of the whole profession. If you want to chat through what is expected, then please get in touch with me directly.
In future blogs, we will chat about what we have been doing in the past year and what challenges we face in the next few months.
The deadline for Dental Council nominations is 09:00 on Wednesday 11 May 2022. Find out more.
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