Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to improve access to the Overseas Registration Exam for Non-European Economic Area nationals wanting to practice dentistry in the UK.

We have recently introduced legislation that enables the General Dental Council (GDC) to increase the capacity of its Overseas Registration Exam (ORE) and improve its international registration processes. It will be for the GDC, as an independent regulator, to decide how best to use the flexibility that the legislation allows to increase the capacity of the ORE assessment.

The current legal framework for the ORE will remain in place until the GDC introduces new rules on the operation of the ORE 12 months after the legislation comes into force, in March 2024. In the meantime, the GDC has announced that it has tripled the number places for Part 1 of the ORE in response to the current demand, meaning there will be 600 places available for the August 2023 sitting of the ORE Part 1, instead of the usual 200.