Elsevier

Dental Abstracts

Volume 60, Issue 2, March–April 2015, Pages 77-78
Dental Abstracts

The Big Picture
Primary dental care safety

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.denabs.2015.01.014Get rights and content

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Background

Patient safety is an essential part of all health care delivery. A working definition of patient safety is the provision of care that minimizes the risk of harming the patient. A review of several ways to evaluate patient safety available for use by health care providers and systems was offered. In addition, the role of patient safety in dentistry was explored.

Evaluation of Patient Safety

Assessments of patient safety may follow the “Swiss cheese model,” active and latent failures, human factors, or systems failures. The “Swiss cheese model” attempts to explain how adverse events or systems failures occur. The layers of safeguards or barriers put in place to prevent adverse occurrences each have holes or potential holes (Fig 1). However, the holes in a specific slice are unlikely to permit a problem unless the holes in each layer line up so that an opportunity opens up and the

Patient Safety in Dentistry

Primary care dentistry differs in many ways from primary medical care. Because of these differences, patient safety issues may not be as significant in dentistry as in medicine, although it cannot be dismissed as unimportant.

The incidence of patient safety incidents has been reduced by introducing systems into secondary care dental settings such as dental hospitals and oral and maxillofacial surgery departments. A checklist developed by the World Health Organization (WHO) identifies three

Discussion

A survey of dental professionals revealed about a third experienced an adverse incident in the preceding 12 months. Most were related to materials, equipment, and drugs. More educational programs are needed to help dentists better understand the importance of patient safety and how reporting such incidents will help them learn from mistakes and reduce recurrences.

Adverse incidents have been reported in three papers dealing with patient safety in primary dental care settings. Most involve

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Bailey E, Tickle M, Campbell S: Patient safety in primary care dentistry: Where are we now? Br Dent J 217:339-344, 2014

Reprints available from E Bailey, Univ of Manchester, School of Dentistry, Higher Cambridge St, Manchester, M13 9PL; e-mail: [email protected]

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