Complaints
to do, whether or not a formal complaint has been made, always contact your defence organisation without delay. Of course, it is profess-
ionally advantageous to keep the number of apologies you have to make to a minimum, and there is a lot that dentists can do to alter the probabilities in their own favour, simply by recognising the situations and factors that lead to mistakes, and acting to minimise the likelihood of them happening in the first place. Life doesn’t go on hold when
you step into the surgery, and multiple distractions are a common cause of error. Just because you’ve seated your patient and administered a local doesn’t mean the phone isn’t going to ring with bad news, whether it’s your bank manager calling up to tell you your overdraft’s been exceeded or your life partner informing you about burst pipes at home. And just because the news wasn’t
“Life doesn’t go on hold when you step into the surgery and multiple distractions are a common cause of error”
good doesn’t mean your receptionist isn’t going to announce, when you’ve put the phone down, that she’s going home early with a headache. Distractions like this can
throw you off kilter, puncture your concentration, and require a conscious effort on your part to tune back in to the patient and the procedure at hand – simply being aware of the possibilities can reduce the risks of error. Like multiple distractions, the
over-full appointment book is to be avoided – or, if not, at least recognised as a potential source of problems. It only takes one extra emergency case, for example, to put you behind and pile on the pressure. If you’re mindful of this, you may well
decide to get back on track by doing less than you’d originally planned for one or two patients in that day’s book, or perhaps even ask a non-urgent patient if they’d mind making a new appointment. A study of GPs showed that the most stressful time, when things were most likely to go wrong, was just before lunchtime – in particular, if they were meeting their life partner for lunch and were already running behind. The study showed that, in these conditions, the GPs’ consultation times plummeted. Combine a short consultation with a highly technical procedure and the chances of things going wrong soon begin to escalate.
Of course, dentists don’t work
in a vacuum but are surrounded by staff who watch their every move. Here, too, is an opportu- nity to minimise error that is not to be missed. Fostering a supportive relationship with your nurse, for example, and making it clear that you’re open to being corrected and challenged, will go a long way to cutting mistakes. Put your nurse down angrily
the first time she suggests you’re anaesthetising the wrong tooth – whether she’s right or wrong – and she may well not speak up when she spots you preparing to extract an upper left four instead of a lower left one... To read the rest of Hew’s
article, visit our website at
bit.ly/SDMag_accidents
® Hew Mathewson is a general practitioner in Edinburgh, a special adviser to the MDDUS and a former President of the General Dental Council.
Scottish Dental magazine 35
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