Abstract
Background. Patient safety incident reporting and analysis are often confined to secondary care, despite 95% of dentistry occurring in primary care. Peninsula Dental Social Enterprise (PDSE) delivers primary care dentistry in education-based settings, using a report-review-action process to underpin its patient safety framework.
Aim. This article analyses trends in clinical incident data, reflecting on learning to improve overall patient safety.
Methods. A retrospective observational study was employed to analyse incidents over a five-year period (2017-2022) using anonymised data from the PDSE reporting system.
Results. Over the 5-year reporting period, there were an average of 13.1 total incidents per 1,000 appointments. Sub-analysis of reported incidents revealed 1.5 clinical incidents, and 0.9 ‘near miss’ incidents. A soft-tissue injury rate of 0.6, a contamination injury rate of 0.9 and 0.3 written complaints were reported per 1,000 appointments.
Conclusion. Patient safety is a key component of quality dental care, especially when delivering clinical dental education. PDSE fosters an environment of transparency, enabling the provider to monitor incident rates. This results in quality improvement systems which sit at the heart of clinical delivery. With a lack of data published from similar settings, comparison to the sector is limited. Further sharing of data is encouraged to enable standardisation and quality benchmarking.