Complaints
Avoiding the banana skin
Hew Mathewson offers advice on what to do when things don’t go quite as planned
show you a dentist who has never practised dentistry. And in truth nobody expects dentists to be perfect – not the General Dental Council (GDC), not their fellow dentists, not the man or woman in the street, not even the no-cure, no-pay lawyer... After all, dentistry is not a
A
straightforward business. It’s not like washing a car or peel- ing a potato. You’re dealing with living tissue inside the mouth of a living, breathing human being. There’s plenty to go wrong – and more besides. When you consider that it is easier for patients to make a complaint to the GDC than ever before (there was a time when they had to contact a lawyer and swear an affidavit; now they can just pick up the phone) and there are more and more lawyers actively scouting for malprac- tice suits, it’s no surprise many dentists spend their lives think- ing they’re going to be sued.
34 Scottish Dental magazine
ccidents will happen. Show me a dentist who has never made a mistake and I will
But the reality is that we as a
profession are hardly ever sued. The reason is simple. When it comes to errors in the dental clinic, it’s not the procedure gone wrong that generally gets dentists called up in front of the GDC, but rather the subsequent attempt to cover it up. Take out the wrong tooth, drill on the wrong side of the mouth to the local anaesthetic, and evidence from both the UK and the US shows that, in cases where dentists hold their hands up and admit the error, less than two per cent of patients will want to take the matter further. Try to cover it up, on the other
hand, by pretending it’s not your fault, blaming your nurse or the laboratory, or simply denying there’s a problem, and patients already unhappy about an unsatisfactory experience will begin to feel angry and frustrated and – research shows – are much more likely to raise a legal action or complain to the GDC, with potentially devastating consequences. In one famous case in the last decade, after making a mistake
with a patient’s dentures and subsequently refusing to acknowledge it, a dentist found himself at the end of the disciplinary line and struck off altogether. He was reported to the NHS Ombudsman, who found independent evidence that the dentist had made a mistake and been rude to a patient. He was ordered to apologise but refused. It so happened that there was another case involving treatment that this dentist had refused to put right, and when he declined to apologise to this patient as well, the Ombudsman reported him to the GDC. There followed a further investigation into the treatment and he was called before the council. I remember his conduct case well. In addition to refusing to accept he’d done anything wrong , in an excessive display of arrogance, he was utterly dismissive of one of the patients. The outcome of the enquiry and the conduct case – that began, I remind you, as one complaint about dentures and one about fillings – was that the
dentist persuaded the panel he simply wasn’t a fit person to practise dentistry. He ended up being struck off because he in effect provoked an investigation into, not so much the quality of his work, but his professionalism and his attitude. What’s more, despite being struck off, he continued to practise dentistry. The result was to be featured in a TV programme about ‘nightmare dentists’ as well as face a criminal prosecution brought against him by the GDC. All of which means that his chances of ever being restored to the register are very slim indeed. And all this arose from a simple failure to say: “I’m sorry, I got it wrong. Let me put it right.” This case is at the very
extreme end of the spectrum and almost all cases are of a different, smaller order of magnitude. But nevertheless the mistake waiting to happen is one of the realities of life as a dentist, and it should be clear that honesty and an apology are always the best policy. Should you ever be in doubt about what
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