Kerry Smith
Introduction
Kerry Smith is a dental nurse — also known at the relevant time as Kerry Sinclair — whom a GDC Professional Conduct Committee erased from the register in November 2023 after she was convicted of embezzling £71,425.63 from a person whose affairs she controlled under power of attorney. The conviction, at Edinburgh Sheriff Court, covered thefts committed between November 2017 and May 2019; she was sentenced to 300 hours of unpaid work, a compensation order and a four-month restriction-of-liberty order, and the committee found she had also failed to tell the GDC about the charge when it was brought .
Background Information
On 16 December 2020 Smith was arrested and charged with embezzlement, being liberated from police custody on an undertaking to appear at Edinburgh Sheriff Court on 12 March 2021; the court documents were in the name Kerry Sinclair, one of the surnames she used at the time. She referred herself to the GDC on 8 March 2022, saying she had been charged in December 2020 and had appeared in court in March 2021 and February 2022. On 17 March 2022 she told the regulator she had received 300 hours of community service, a fine and a four-month tag. A Police National Computer check and a Full Extract Conviction Report from Edinburgh Sheriff Court set out the true picture .
The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation
The extract conviction record showed that on 18 February 2022 Smith was convicted of embezzlement: between 9 November 2017 and 6 May 2019, “while having power of attorney” over the person named in the charge, she embezzled £71,425.63, contrary to the Criminal Justice and Licensing (Scotland) Act 2010. The committee accepted the extract as conclusive proof of the offence and found the conviction charge proved. The sentence, confirmed through the PNC record, comprised a community payback order with 300 hours of unpaid work within twelve months, a compensation order, and a restriction-of-liberty order requiring her to remain within her dwelling between 8pm and 7am for four months .
The second charged failing was the delay and framing of her disclosure. The GDC’s standards required registrants to inform the regulator immediately if they were subject to criminal proceedings anywhere in the world. Smith had been charged in December 2020 but did not contact the GDC until March 2022, and even then her account of the sentence did not match the official records. The committee found this charge proved as well, treating her position as a registered dental nurse as carrying the same disclosure obligations as any other registrant .
In reaching its decisions the committee applied the rule that a certified conviction is conclusive proof of the offence, subject only to evidence that the registrant is not the person named — which was not suggested here, given Smith’s own self-referral describing the same proceedings. The remaining question was sanction, where the GDC sought erasure on the basis of the conviction’s gravity, the abuse of a power-of-attorney position, and the disclosure failures .
Public Reaction and Consequences
The committee found Smith’s fitness to practise impaired by reason of her conviction and misconduct, and directed erasure from the register. MedicWatch’s determination page records the Professional Conduct Committee decision and its direction of erasure following the November 2023 hearing, noting the conviction charge and the disclosure charge as the two limbs of the case . The determination records no challenge to the conviction itself and no evidence offered to displace its conclusive status .
Current Status
Smith was erased from the dental register, with an immediate suspension order imposed on public-protection and public-confidence grounds; the erasure would take effect 28 days after deemed service unless she appealed, and her existing interim order was revoked. MedicWatch lists her among dental professionals struck off in 2023 , with the determination page carrying the erasure outcome and no appeal result noted .
Impact on Their Career/Life
A conviction for embezzling more than £71,000 from a vulnerable person whose affairs she was trusted to manage — compounded by a fifteen-month failure to tell her regulator about the charge — ended Smith’s dental nursing registration. The case turns on the abuse of a position of absolute trust: the committee’s published reasoning treats a power-of-attorney theft of that scale as irreconcilable with the honesty the register demands, whatever the criminal court’s disposal .