Abstract
INTRODUCTION:
The
effort to increase patient safety has become one of the main focal
points of all health care professions, despite the fact that, in the
field of dentistry, initiatives have come late and been less ambitious.
The main objective of patient safety is to avoid preventable adverse
events to the greatest extent possible and to limit the negative
consequences of those which are unpreventable. Therefore, it is
essential to ascertain what adverse events occur in each dental care
activity in order to study them in-depth and propose measures for
prevention.
OBJECTIVES:
To
ascertain the characteristics of the adverse events which originate
from dental care, to classify them in accordance with type and origin,
to determine their causes and consequences, and to detect the factors
which facilitated their occurrence.
MATERIAL AND METHOD:
This
study includes the general data from the series of adverse dental vents
of the Spanish Observatory for Dental Patient Safety (OESPO) after the
study and analysis of 4,149 legal claims (both in and out of court)
based on dental malpractice from the years of 2000 to 2010 in Spain.
RESULTS:
Implant
treatments, endodontics and oral surgery display the highest
frequencies of adverse events in this series (25.5%, 20.7% and 20.4%
respectively). Likewise, according to the results, up to 44.3% of the
adverse events which took place were due to predictable and preventable
errors and complications.
CONCLUSION:
A very significant percentage were due to foreseeable and preventable errors and complications that should not have occurred.
Comments