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Learning from clinical data on the subject of safety in dentistry is still in its early stages and current evidence does not provide epidemiological estimates on adverse events (AEs) associated with dental care. The aim of this dental practice study was to quantify and describe the nature and severity of harm experienced in association with dental care, and to assess for disparities in the prevalence of AEs.

Conscious sedation helps reduce anxiety, discomfort, and pain during certain procedures. This is accomplished with medications and (sometimes) local anesthesia to induce relaxation. Conscious sedation is commonly used in dentistry for people who feel anxious or panicked during complex procedures like fillings, root canals, or routine cleanings. It’s also often used during endoscopies and minor surgical procedures to relax patients and minimise discomfort. Find out more about the procedure, the drugs used and the side effects.

Getting It Right First Time (GIRFT) is designed to improve the quality of care within the NHS by reducing unwarranted variations. By tackling variations in the way services are delivered across the NHS, and by sharing best practice between trusts, GIRFT identifies changes that will help improve care and patient outcomes, as well as delivering efficiencies such as the reduction of unnecessary procedures and cost savings. Hospital dentistry deals with the most complex dental work, which accounts for about 5% of procedures in England. The GIRFT hospital dentistry report presents 21 recommendations to improve patient experience, which cover three main themes: Ensuring all healthcare workers understand and promote good oral health, especially for children Creating equal access to treatment Addressing workforce and training issues to meet future demand It also highlights that hospital dentistry needs to improve the way it records treatment and outcome data. You will need a FutureNHS account to view this report, or you can watch a short video summary which includes key recommendations.

This interview is part of the hub's 'Frontline insights during the pandemic' series where Martin Hogan interviews healthcare professionals from various specialties to capture their experience and insight during the coronavirus pandemic. Here Martin interviews an oral surgeon who has been in the post for a year in a trust that covers two sites in the West Country. 

The Health and Social Care Committee is calling for urgent action to assess and tackle a backlog of appointments and an unknown patient demand for all health services, specifically across cancer treatments, mental health services, dentistry services, GP services and elective surgery. MPs say a compelling case has been made for the nationwide routine testing of all NHS staff and they are yet to understand why it cannot be introduced. The inquiry, launched in April, considered the provision of essential health and care services both during and after the pandemic and how the resulting pent-up demand for services would be managed and met. Representatives of the Royal Colleges, NHS Providers, the NHS Confederation, health think tanks, patients and patient groups, the Chief Executive of the NHS and other senior NHS leaders were among those who gave evidence. Members of the Committee pay tribute to frontline NHS and care staff who lost their lives to coronavirus and their bereaved families. Health and Social Care Committee Chair Rt Hon Jeremy Hunt MP said: “We are proud of the heroic contribution made by frontline NHS and care staff during this pandemic, which has saved many lives. Thanks to their efforts not a single coronavirus patient has been denied an intensive care bed or ventilator unlike in other countries. “However the pandemic has also massively impacted normal NHS services, something that could have been mitigated with earlier infection control measures in hospitals and clearer communication to patients whose care was disrupted. Weekly testing of NHS staff has been repeatedly promised in hotspot areas - but is still not being delivered. Failure to do so creates a real risk that the NHS will be forced to retreat into being a largely Covid-only service during a second spike. "We've heard of severe disruption to services, especially cancer, and here we could be looking at tens of thousands avoidable deaths within a year. If we’re to avoid this going forward it is time to give as much priority to avoiding harm and death caused by the interruption of normal NHS services and introduce mass testing for all NHS staff. Today we set out these and other steps the government and NHS leaders must take to manage services through a second wave."

The aim of this article, published in Dental Update, is to inform and update the reader on NHS England patient safety initiatives applicable to dentistry, specifically the development of an example Local Safety Standards for Invasive Procedures (LocSSIPs) for wrong site extraction.

The aim of this study, published by the British Dentistry Journal, was to identify and develop a candidate 'never event' list for primary care dentistry. The study achieved its aim of beginning a consensus building process to develop and validate a preliminary list of candidate never events for primary care dentistry. Consensus was achieved on a list of nine candidate never events covering a range of potentially serious system wide issues, most of which relate to patient safety checking procedures. At the time of publication, this was one of a small number of dental studies with an explicit focus in terms of developing a tool to help improve patient safety related work practices and performance in this setting, potentially reducing risks to practitioners and practices alike.

This paper, published by the Scandinavian Journal, Acta Odontologica Scandinavica, assesses current patient safety incident (PSI) prevention measures and risk management practices among Finnish dentists. 

Keren Levy was fit and healthy when she first felt pain in a molar. After numerous dentists and doctors left it untreated, there were knock-on effects throughout her body. Today she is in constant pain and look almost unrecognisable She went to the dentist a number of times but X-rays showed nothing untoward. However, Karen started to develop a horribly rotting taste and knew the tooth was necrotic. She begged her dentist to give her root canal treatment or extract it, but without a visible sign this was needed she was refused. Instead she was referred to her GP, implying her distress was bereavement due to her mother recently dying. Many months later, Keren was referred to a different dentist who gave her a 3D scan that showed the original tooth to be necrotic, as she had said five months before. Evidence of the infection was clear in the surrounding bone. Her dentist records that the delay in treating the original dental infection appears to have triggered a systemic response in my body’s autonomic or endocrine system. Having had perfect health, eventually I had to have 12 root canals; all those teeth were necrotic.  Confronted by the facts, the first dentist Keren saw said that, had he been in his Athens surgery, he would have carried out a root canal on the original tooth. But here, in the UK, he had been concerned he could be held to account by General Dental Council (GDC) regulations, given the X-ray image had not been “definitive”.  An editorial in the British Dental Journal (BDJ) as long ago as 2014 described a climate of “fear and distrust” that had led to defensive dentistry because of the prospect of legal action or disciplinary procedures if anything goes wrong.  Karen's case is a horrific example of excessive diagnostic testing delay, instead of treatment. Months of referrals to neurologists, maxillo-facial specialists, psychologists, GPs, oral medicine departments and other dentists went against common sense and ensured responsibility could never be laid at a particular dentist’s door. Invariably, the first question was: “What did the last dentist say?”