From Volume 44, Issue 10, November 2017 | Pages 947-956
Patient safety is the absence of preventable harm to a patient during the process of healthcare and is critical to the provision of a quality service. Many National Health Service (NHS) improvement initiatives have been developed in relation to patient safety, resulting in changes in culture, reporting and learning. These include the publication by the NHS England Surgical Never Events taskforce of ‘
Dentistry provides one of the NHS's highest volume of surgical interventions. Unlike other surgical procedures, the vast majority of these surgical interventions occur under local anaesthesia on conscious and often anxious patients. This high volume, often complex, work creates the opportunity for mistakes to happen, which can be devastating for both the patient and the clinical team. Wrong site surgery in dentistry may not always cause significant physical harm to the patient, such as the loss of a limb, but it is a source of injury and stress and may be symptomatic of problems in the clinical systems and processes of the environment within which it occurs. By a better understanding of why patient safety incidents, including wrong site surgery, occur it should be possible to improve patient safety systems and processes to reduce the risk of future harm.
By definition, patient safety is the absence of preventable harm to a patient during the process of healthcare, and the discipline of patient safety is the co-ordinated efforts to prevent harm from occurring to patients, caused by the process of healthcare itself.1
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