The evolution of patient safety procedures in an oral surgery department.

Abstract

NHS Improvement highlights the importance of providing consistently safe care within the NHS. For dental professionals, this particularly concerns the reporting and avoidance of never events such as wrong tooth extraction and other serious incidents. Within the authors' unit, a number of infrequent never events and the national drive to introduce safety frameworks (NatSSIPs) has led to a reassessment of our safety procedures. In this paper, as part of our safety improvements, we discuss the chronological changes made in safety procedures following untoward events. Subsequently, we introduced a surgical safety briefing (the 'huddle') within the outpatient setting where we undertake invasive oral surgery procedures under local anaesthetic including intravenous sedation. By supplementing the 'huddle' with human factors training for all clinical staff there have been no further never events or serious incidents in the last two and a half years.