The Osteology Foundation provides three different general checklists that can be used at different points in time:
Treatment planning phase
Day of surgery
These checklists can be customized and downloaded, or they can be stored in My BOX. They can be printed and filled out by hand, or they can be filled out online and then saved to the computer.
Human errors occur daily, everywhere and in many different constellations (1). As long as humans are involved in any kind of processes, there will be no discipline unaffected by human failures. These are not new findings since we have always known that “To Err Is Human” (2).
In the medical field, human errors can lead to minor local or major general complications that may cause the death of the patient. This already led to the proposal of surgical safety check lists by the World Health Organization (WHO) (3, 4).
Surgical safety checklists can function as barriers for the occurrence of human errors and improve the sharing of patient-related medical information between team members (5). Consequently, significantly reductions in death and peri-operative complications have been achieved (6).
Nowadays, a patient safety culture is on the rise in a variety of disciplines (7, 8). This especially relates to medical disciplines i.e. anaesthesiology and surgery (where procedures are mainly performed under general anaesthesia) (9, 10). However, also minor medical procedures, as well as dental treatments, can be affected by human errors and lead to harm.
Therefore it's also time for dental professionals to become more familiar with the general context of patient safety and to establish a patient safety culture in daily practice.
Let’s take a look at the data
In primary care dentistry, data concerning the incidence of complications occurring in daily practice, as well as reports about the implementation of safety measures, is infrequent and the improvement of patient safety is a concept with a distinct lack of evidence base (11). Since modern dentistry has become increasingly sophisticated, and this in turn has increased the risk to the patient, patient safety can be considered as a comparatively new discipline (11, 12).
In dentistry, the main incidents known from the current literature include the following: injuries (10%), medical emergencies (6%), inhalations/ingestions (4%), adverse reactions (4%) and wrong site extractions (2%) (12). Interestingly, most of these complications are due to human errors (36%) and a significant amount of iatrogenic harm occurs not during treatment, but through controllable pre- and post-procedural check-ups. It has been shown that checklists can reduce human error based incidents by improving team communication and directly lead to minimizing surgical related risks with an increase in implant success rates (13).
Watch also the video below on this topic
Franck Renouard about Errors and Checklists
This video, as well as a French version are also available in the library.
Literature:
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