Dr Roshni Karia MCGDent, President of the College of General Dentistry, describes the four pillars of its new philosophy of care, an approach it encourages all oral healthcare professionals to adopt in the interests of patients.
When I first took office as President of the College of General Dentistry, the College Council worked hard to focus our priorities. We carefully crafted our mission and vision for dentistry, which set out our values and anchored our initiatives in professional morality, institutional integrity and the public interest. This ethical foundation speaks directly to our ongoing aspirations for a Royal Charter for our profession.
To help guide the evolution of contemporary oral health care, the College has now established a four-pillar philosophy of care – a living blueprint which serves as a professional compass for our entire oral healthcare community:
1. Holistic care
Oral health is inextricably linked to general health, and we are developing an Oral Health for Healthcare curriculum for the wider health and social care workforce. This initiative, in which we are working with the Chief Dental Officer for England and supported by Colgate, will create an ecosystem of resources which finally recognises oral health as a central tenet of systemic health and wellbeing.
By adding an oral health dimension to their practice, healthcare colleagues beyond dentistry will be equipped to raise awareness of oral-systemic connections. Actionable prompts and accessible resources will empower patients and streamline communication throughout health and social care. Importantly, it will aim to synchronise the care patients receive between general and oral healthcare systems.
We are already collaborating with stakeholders in many relevant sectors:
- pharmacy and retail
- general nursing and general medical practice
- dietetics and diabetes care
- cardiology, bone health and oncology
- health visiting, early years, and care homes
- undergraduate medical education
This means the resources will be directly applicable to those involved in:
- early years and maternity care
- care of adults and chronic disease management
- elderly and dementia care
- disabilities and complex care needs
To ensure widespread clinical utility, we have collated early insights and hosted a workshop designed to understand the real-life challenge that our frontline colleagues face. We have now started to work through potential solutions to navigate these hurdles, as we progress to engineer simple, realistic and pragmatic resources. This initiative will position the College as the leading authority in oral health among our health and social care colleagues.
2. Assured care
Through our formalised career pathways, credentialling schemes and portfolio of guidelines, the College promotes higher standards of care to assure clinical quality and patient safety. Our Faculty Deans have worked hard to develop progressive career pathways, underpinned by our Professional Framework, to provide a more structured and supported career trajectory for all those working in dental primary care.
To take but one example, our Certified Practitioner programme will help to validate the higher skill levels individuals have achieved, and the greater knowledge and further experience they have gained, in specific disciplines. Planned to extend to all members of the oral healthcare team, this will support colleagues in more strategic decisions about their career choices as well as help patients to make informed decisions about the care they receive.
Fellowship, the most distinguished membership of the College, focuses on how members of the whole team have developed their practice for the benefit of both patients and the wider profession. Whether it be through clinical expertise, teaching, research, leadership or in the legal/ethical field, Fellows help the College serve as a catalyst for a shared community of practice. This ensures we can support one another in realising our professional aspirations and reinforce our sense of belonging, while serving patients at our very best.
To ensure greater confidence among practitioners in navigating postgraduate and post qualification education, the College is launching a Training Provider Forum. This group will allow post-qualification education providers to help shape the College’s developing role in quality assurance, guide early-career practitioners, and support our credentialling schemes. Furthermore, our Academic Court will recognise those whose intellectual contributions are central to the delivery of the College’s mission, bringing them together to ensure the College’s continued authority in promoting high standards in education and practice.
Together, these initiatives empower the workforce, advance the profession and support the public and patients to achieve and maintain good oral health.
3. Responsive and proactive care
We aim to drive a major shift from reactive treatment to patient-centred prevention, early detection and tooth preservation, and have convened an international expert consensus group to review the evidence and create a pragmatic framework around initial caries management for the whole oral healthcare team.
Supported by vVardis, this work is led by Professor Avijit Banerjee FCGDent, Dean of the CGDent Faculty of Dentists, who has set out the details of this pivotal aspect of our philosophy of care in the latest issue of the Primary Dental Journal (PDJ). It is intended that this paper will form the basis for upcoming, evidence-based recommendations on the management of early caries in general dental practice.
4. Ethical and Professional Care
The College actively promotes a moral and ethical framework for treatment choices. This includes the importance of beneficence and the decided focus on diagnosis, while carefully weighing the nuanced detail and salient facts that inform our management options.
Some of you will have heard the inaugural College Lecture, Satisficing standards in dentistry: Who decides? Who benefits?, which was delivered by Mr Martin Kelleher FCGDent in June 2025; these questions will also be discussed in the next issue of the PDJ. Building upon the same themes, Dr Catherine Rutland FCGDent will be delivering the 2026 College Lecture, The Ethical Shield: Protecting enamel, professional integrity and patient smiles, on Thursday 12 November in London; this is open to all dental professionals, and others with professional interests in contemporary dental practice, and I encourage readers to attend if you can.
Our upcoming articles and frameworks will guide the profession’s philosophy of care – proving that true sustainability in dentistry starts with preserving enamel.
Writing the future of dentistry
Through these four pillars, we aim to write the future of dental care for the UK and beyond. We are setting a bold direction built upon the firm foundations we proudly inherited from the former Faculty of General Dental Practice UK (FGDP).
As we celebrate the fifth anniversary of the College, I encourage you to be a part of this journey, where our ambitions speak confidently toward a future Royal College – as our Honorary Founding President, Professor Sir Nairn Wilson CBE, has previously said, “a College that befits excellence in the care of patients with dedicated support for the profession.”
I urge all those delivering oral healthcare to adopt this philosophy of care for the benefit of patients everywhere, and to get behind your future Royal College so that it can stand tall on behalf of all the dental professions. Working together, let these be our greatest achievements.
This article was first published in the recent ‘Dental education’ issue of the Primary Dental Journal, further information on which is available via the button below.
‘Initial dental caries management: a College of General Dentistry (CGDent) philosophy of care statement’, by Professor Avijit Banerjee, is in the same issue. This paper is currently restricted to College members and PDJ subscribers, however it is intended that it will be made available to the whole profession in due course.
