The General Dental Council (GDC) voted at its meeting on 8 December 2005 to recommend that Special Care Dentistry become a new specialty, ending years of lobbying and months of speculation. The GDC Review Group, taking on the Joint Advisory Committee for Special Care Dentistry's (JACSCD) definition of the discipline as 'the improvement of oral health of individuals and groups in society who have a physical, sensory, intellectual, mental, medical emotional or social impairment or disability or, more often, a combination of these factors', decided that the establishment of such a specialty would be in the interests of patients. This would be served, the Group added by:

  • Providing an appropriate referral option for patients with special needs.

  • Providing a group of highly trained specialists who could support and help educate other dental practitioners in the provision of care for patients with special needs.

  • Improving the standard of care for this group of patients.

In this context the Review Group felt that Special Care Dentistry was a distinctive branch of dentistry in terms of the overall treatment need of a particular group of patients and parallels were drawn with the already established specialty of Paediatric Dentistry. They had received a large number of responses from a wide range of individuals and bodies with arguments both for and against the establishment of the specialty. In the future, specialists in Special Care Dentistry will help to meet the need for an interface between primary and secondary care in providing an appropriate referral option. Additionally, they will fulfil the role of supporting and teaching other dentists how to meet the needs of this particular group of patients.