Sir, institutions and holders of high office including the BDA and OCDO have extended their traditional warm congratulations to the incoming GDC Chair, Baron Harris of Haringey (Lord Toby Harris). Such gestures are professional and proper. However, we would like to offer something potentially more substantive for the public and wider profession: some reading suggestions.

The first is Black box thinking by Matthew Syed, who advocates that after things have gone wrong, genuine change can only occur through a process of open learning.1 Syed explains how over successive decades, diverse industries have benefitted from such a culture, dramatically improving their safety and performance (notably in aviation).

Our public institutions on occasion appear to react as if the nation would benefit without those healthcare professionals (HCPs) who persevere despite suboptimal working environments. The treatment of Dr Bawa-Garba creates the perception that UK regulatory/legal framework adjudicates individual HCPs' performance as if supposedly working in an idyllic environment, with unlimited resources, where everything works, communication errors do not happen and staff are never unwell. Dr Bawa-Garba is a medical doctor. However, for those who work in any field of healthcare (including dentistry), that a single HCP can be censured for system-wide failings is both intimidating and discouraging.

The second is not a book but an inspirational interview with the late Nobel laureate physicist Professor Richard Feynman.2 Even for those with no interest in physics, Feynman elegantly demonstrates the beneficial intellectual discovery when an enquiring mind continues to ask: 'Why?' It would appear our current healthcare regulatory mechanisms neglect to embrace this enquiring thought process, and accordingly, fail to discover the fundamental causes which are necessary to understand for developing genuine and beneficial change.

A healthcare regulator seeking genuine change in the safety and performance of all stakeholders requires its leadership to acknowledge organisational failings and that resource limitations genuinely do exist. Limitations and failings upon which, no matter how devoted or capable the individual HCP is, they have little or no influence. Syed observes that genuine progress fails to occur when individuals are considered solely to blame for endemic systems failings. Feynman simply asks why? Dentistry would do well to learn from both.