Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on the Remumeration of General Dental Practitioners.

  • Great Britain. Inter-Departmental Committee on the Remumeration of General Dental Practitioners.
Date:
[1948]
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on the Remumeration of General Dental Practitioners. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    income-tax, and that we should do so in terms of the 1939 value of money. On this point, we formed the same ‘view as the Interdepartmental Committee on the Remuneration of General Practitioners*, and decided that, in view of © our constitution, we as a committee were, firstly, not called upon—except to the extent referred to in paragraph 8—to determine what a practitioner's professional expenses ought to be, and secondly, that we too were not qualified to form an opinion on the adjustment of pre-war incomes that would be required to produce corresponding incomes today. We endorse, in this connexion, the views of the Committee on the Remuneration of General] Practitioners who stated in their Report* :—‘‘ We leave to others the problem of the necessary adjustment to present conditions, but we would observe in this connexion that such adjustment should have direct regard not only to estimates of the change in the value of money but to the increases which have in fact taken place since 1939 in incomes in other professions. In our judgment, it is only if corresponding changes are made in the incomes of general practitioners that the recruitment and status of their profession will be maintained as against these professions’’. The dental profession readily agreed to relate their evidence to the incomes received by dental practitioners during the years 1936, 1937 and 1938. 8. Soon after we commenced work it was suggested to us by certain Trades Union representatives of dental technicians that, notwithstanding that our terms of reference were concerned with the remuneration of dental practi- tioners, we should probably be compelled to take into consideration in. formulating our recommendations the wages of dental technicians. This suggestion seemed to us to involve questions of policy necessitating reference to Ministers. We were informed subsequently that the Ministers’ view was that it was undesirable for us to enter into discussions as to the remuneration of dental technicians, since there already exists appropriate industrial machinery for settling this. We have therefore refrained from inquiring into the wages of dental technicians. We would, however, emphasise that any arrangement designing to secure that dentists receive the net remuneration which we recommend will have to take into account not only that professional expenses _ have in general increased substantially since 1938, and are liable to further variation, but that this consideration has special importance in regard to the remuneration of dental technicians, since this forms a large part of the professional expenses of dental practitioners. 7 g. The dental organisations submitted to us, with their memorandum of evidence, separate tables of gross and net incomes for practices in large towns and for those in other towns, the number of exclusively rural practices being negligible. These tables were prepared from figures collected from the questionnaire issued to all members of the dental profession who were in practice in 1938. The number of replies having been less than had been hoped, some doubt existed as to the degree of reliance which could be placed upon — the picture presented by these tables. We were, however, advised by the- Government Actuary that the replies could be accepted as reflecting, in a broad way, the general financial position of the profession. eee: . to. While the incomes of dentists in large towns (i.e., towns with a popula- tion exceeding 100,000) were generally somewhat higher than those of dentists in small towns, the differences were not so large as to make separate considera- tion necessary. For our purposes, therefore, we have considered the figures