John Geater Craig
Introduction
John Geater Craig is a former UK dental care professional who held registration with the General Dental Council (GDC) under number 157838 in two titles, clinical dental technician and dental technician. On 14 October 2025 a Professional Conduct Committee (PCC) found his fitness to practise impaired by reason of misconduct and directed erasure from the register, after finding that at a review hearing on 17 June 2022 he told the panel that NHS Education for Scotland (NES) could not assist him because he was not an NHS employee — a statement it found false, misleading and dishonest. Craig attended the 2025 hearings unrepresented, gave evidence and denied acting dishonestly.
Background Information
Craig’s regulatory history stretched back a decade. In November 2016 a PCC found his fitness to practise impaired by misconduct, on facts including dishonest conduct relating to his record-keeping and to his contact with, and about, a patient. His registration was suspended for 12 months, extended by a further 12 months in December 2017, then replaced with conditional registration in November 2018. The conditions — extended in November 2019, December 2020 and December 2021 — required him to meet the Postgraduate Dental Dean or Director, through NES, to develop his personal development plan (PDP).
At the resumed hearing on 17 June 2022 the PCC reviewed those conditions and, on Craig’s account of his dealings with NES, removed the deanery requirements; what he said there became the subject of the 2025 case. The conditions were reviewed again afterwards — in November 2022 the PCC found him no longer impaired as a dental technician but still impaired as a clinical dental technician, and in February 2024 it allowed the conditions to lapse, so he was working unrestricted when the charge was brought. The 2025 committee was chaired by dentist Matthew King, with dental care professional Karen Suarez and lay member Miranda Carruthers-Watt.
The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation
Adjudicated vs. alleged. The findings below are those of the GDC’s Professional Conduct Committee, made on the balance of probabilities. They are regulatory findings, not criminal convictions. Craig attended and gave evidence, denied acting dishonestly, and his account of a phone call with NES was not believed.
The charge concerned a single statement. The transcript of the 17 June 2022 hearing records Craig telling the PCC: “I have contacted NES on numerous occasions and been told eventually after several phone calls and I have emailed I was notified that because I didn’t work for the NHS Scotland and that I wasn’t an NHS Scotland contractor or under education they would be unable to help me with my PDP.”
The committee found the statement false. Gillian Nevin, an Assistant Postgraduate Dental Dean with NES who assisted Craig from 2019 to 2023, said NES supports dental care professionals and even registrants who do not work in the NHS, on payment of a £150 fee. Emails from September and October 2019 showed Craig arranging an invoice for exactly that support, and he produced the invoice, dated 30 September 2019, in his evidence. In the committee’s judgement this showed he knew support was available to him as a non-NHS employee, and that the difficulties instead emanated from his lack of engagement.
Craig’s defence was that he had passed on what he was told: in late March 2022, he said, an administrator at the Dundee Deanery informed him NES could not help him as he was not an NHS employee. He could not name the person, could not give the date, and accepted there was no documentary record of the call. He accepted his statement “was not 100 per cent true” and could be construed as misleading, but denied acting deliberately or dishonestly, called the affair a “miscommunication” and a “misunderstanding”, and maintained that NES had told him what he reported, while accepting his past dishonesty.
The committee did not believe his account, finding it more likely than not that the call never took place. The statement had misled the 2022 committee into removing the deanery conditions; applying the test in Ivey v Genting Casinos, it found Craig knew support was available and acted dishonestly, misdirecting the PCC “in a deliberately deceitful manner” to avoid the suspension the GDC sought, his 2016 finding connoting a “pattern of obfuscatory behaviour”. At the resumed hearing he produced an email received at 6:44 that morning purporting to corroborate the call; doubting its veracity, the committee attached no weight to it.
Public Reaction and Consequences
No public or media reaction is recorded in the determination, so the consequences that matter are the committee’s. It found the proven conduct amounted to misconduct — a serious falling short breaching the fundamental tenet of honesty and integrity, which fellow dental professionals would consider “deplorable” — and that his fitness to practise remained impaired on public protection and public interest grounds, his stage-two submissions being “self-serving, contradictory and made without proper acknowledgement” of its findings.
The aggravating factors were stark: his lack of insight into the dishonesty, a “blatant and wilful disregard of the role of the GDC”, and appearing to have deceived the PCC “in order to continue to work”. Notably, GDC counsel sought only a three-to-six-month suspension with review; the committee went further, finding his dishonesty and disregard for the regulatory process “ingrained and entrenched” and suggestive of a “deep-seated and harmful professional attitudinal issue”, fundamentally incompatible with continued registration.
Current Status
Craig was erased from the GDC register on 14 October 2025, the direction applying to both of his registered titles. He asked to be allowed time to make arrangements at his place of work, but the committee ordered his registration suspended immediately, effective from service of the decision notice: unless he appeals, the erasure is recorded in the register 28 days from deemed service, and if he appeals, the immediate suspension remains in place until any appeal concludes. MedicWatch’s summary of the outcome records him as struck off the register.
Impact on Their Career/Life
The erasure ends Craig’s career in both of his registered roles in the United Kingdom. It is his second finding of dishonesty, and the committee treated that history as evidence of a pattern, making restoration in practical terms a remote prospect. The immediate order also denied him the wind-down he sought: he told the committee that suspension would have “devastating consequences” for him, and for colleagues and patients, but he was barred from practising at once.