Council highlights for August 3, 2023
The 438th Council meeting of the RCDSO was held virtually via Zoom on Thursday, August 3th, 2023. The meeting was also livestreamed; a video recording of the Council session will be available on the College’s YouTube channel.
This meeting was a special meeting, called solely to discuss changes to the new emergency class certificate of registration requested by the Ministry of Health.
As noted at the April Council meeting, the Ontario Ministry of Health is requiring all of Ontario’s 26 health regulatory colleges to develop a new emergency class certificate of registration, which is designed for expedited registration of dentists to swiftly address an emergency.
The proposed regulation amendment creates a new class of licensure – a term-limited emergency certificate of registration. The class of registration will only be open for applications if the government requests that the RCDSO open this class, or if Council decides that it is in the public interest to do so.
It is customary and expected that, as the regulation amendment is finalized, minor wording and organizational changes may be proposed by either the Ministry or the RCDSO.
In July, the Ministry requested two substantive changes to the regulation amendment:
- That the requirement to pay an application fee for another class of licensure post-emergency is to be waived.
- That when determining that there is an emergency, Council is required to consider factors related to registration. The Ministry’s express direction to regulatory colleges: to construe ‘emergency’ broadly’ All regulations for all 26 colleges will contain this same language.
Council approved these changes along with a request to the Minister to bypass the required consultation period for regulation amendments in order to meet the Ministry deadline.
It is expected that the regulation amendments for all health regulatory colleges is expected to be approved by government by August 31st, 2023.
More work will continue by staff and the RCDSO Council working group on implementation.
For more information on the amendments, please see 2023-08-03 Council Meeting_20230802133306_0.pdf (agilitycms.com)
Next Meeting
The next meeting of Council will be hybrid and is scheduled for Thursday, September 21th, 2023. For those attending in person, Council will gather in Toronto and the meeting will also be livestreamed.