Creating a dental trauma care pathway in a district general hospital

Abstract

INTRODUCTION Traumatic dental injuries occur frequently in children and adults. Many of these present to the hospital emergency department for acute management by maxillofacial dental core trainees. METHODS A quality improvement project was carried out at East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust to introduce a defined multidisciplinary care pathway for the management of dental trauma patients to improve the quality of care and patient related outcome measures. This consisted of four main components including staff and patient education, departmental facilities and a four-cycle audit. RESULTS The recorded history of ‘when, where and what’ generally improved over the four audit cycles, as did documentation relating to medical history, medications, allergies and tetanus. By the fourth cycle, all areas had 100% compliance. CONCLUSIONS There has been an improvement in the acute management of dental trauma in the trust. This quality improvement project has highlighted the benefit of a multidisciplinary approach with appropriate long-term patient follow-up. In addition, it has been successful in implementing a dental trauma care pathway.