Dental Protection applauds GDC’s stress-busting approach
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- Published: Thursday, 27 June 2013 07:47
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Kevin Lewis, Dental Director for Dental Protection said; “Dental Protection Limited (DPL) is a member of The Medical Protection Society Limited (MPS) group of companies, which is the world’s leading professional indemnity organisation for doctors, dentists and other healthcare professionals; as such it is in the best position to understand the needs of members who are investigated by a national regulatory body. It is for this reason that our organisation provides all members with access to a confidential counselling service if the need should arise during a regulatory or legal challenge whilst practising their chosen profession.”
“More dental members have been investigated by the General Dental Council in the last two years than at any time in our 120 years of experience. Clearly to reduce the stress to members of the dental team it is desirable to ensure proportionality in the numbers of clinicians being investigated and the length of time it takes for an investigation to be completed. Meanwhile dental members who find themselves at the centre of a professional challenge are encouraged to explore the benefits of counselling with the dento-legal adviser managing their case. There is no additional charge for this service which is provided as a benefit of membership.”
Compounded Stress
For a long time it seems the stress, or should that be Distress caused by a regulatory complaint, has caused problems for those professionals (the vast majority) who DO actually care about patients and being professional, who do take any complaint/allegations made, very personally indeed. Unlike many industries who have dedicated complaints departments, Dentistry is still a one to one personal service, far more intimate and meaningful than most businesses simply selling a mass-produced inanimate product.It is thus very important that Complaints/Dis-satisfaction issues are still done sensitively to ALL parties involved, because these Professionals are STILL in the vast majority of cases, continuing to provide much needed care and treatments to the public. The patient is STILL living their normal life with this complaint adding to their life-stresses too.
What IS in the public interest is resolution of the complaint which BEST benefits the Public, whilst of course maintaining standards too.
This is often done Optimally by addressing the complaint in a CONSTRUCTIVE manner that fixes any immediate problem for the patient, ensures future repetition is minimised or eliminated OR of course may find that the complaint was NOT actually a matter that breached Professional standards even though someone expressed a dis-satisfaction with some aspect of a complaint.
Achieving this in a TIMELY manner also is critical to allow ALL parties to move on - dragging such complaints out over a long period of time just increases dis-satisfaction and stress for all parties ,whatever the outcome may then eventually be.
I personally would point to the 'gold-standard' example of the Dental Complaints Service. Yes I am biased because I am a member of the Board overseeing this public service and must give credit to my other board and GDC colleagues who have supported this 'new' approach to complaints investigation/resolution and particularly Derek Prentice, whose vision on what such a service should achieve, has been instrumental is actually reaching those goals.
I will let the DCS stats speak for themselves - from receiving a Complaint to full resolution the average timescale is 9 days - yes you read that right, days, NOT 9 months or several years!
Better still, the user satisfaction rates mean both Dental Professionals & Patients have a greater than 85% high satisfaction rate of the service EVEN when decisions have gone against them!!!
Personally I believe MANY complaints in Dentistry, whether NHS or Private, could be better dealt with by such a service - the DCS has raised the bar and I feel sure far too many complaints, by default, get sent to the GDC now for FtP when the NHS reorganisation is in disarray, the NHS systems are laborious, costly and dragged out over long timescales and you can see why some NHS managers simply think it's cheaper/easier to send/dump onto the GDC instead of investigating properly themselves.
With complaints rising over 40% a year to the GDC but also similar rises for regulators of other Frontline Clinical Services, one also has to ask what else is going on in a wider context to account for this increase - surely it can't all be lowering of individual professional standards?
When I speak to many colleagues in Dentistry and Medicine, it is clear there are SYSTEM issues too, where pressure to meet Targets and rush through more patients in less time, means Professionals are under even MORE stress and pressure at work to over-perform volume wise, so less time to care per patient, less time to explain things and thus INEVITABLY more Complaints, Misunderstandin gs and Dis-Satisfaction in such a Pressure-Cooker intense System!
That surely cannot and should not be ignored as a cause of such rising complaints statistics across Frontline Healthcare - individuals have a responsibility for sure ,but as mid-Staff and the francis report showed, even when Whistleblowing clinicians were ostracised and threatened by management and even labelled 'under-performers' when the tried to make it better for patients :(
So YES we need better systems, FtP is being changed/improved, DCS is now a gold-standard complaints system with extremely high user satisfaction from the public and professionals alike, BUT we must not forget the very poor NHS complaints systems and the Pressure-Cooker NHS management systems Professionals and Patients are both victims of too !!!
As I've always said, what is bad for Dentists and their Teams is Bad for Patients too.
If we could change from the 'blame-culture' to a more open and transparent mindset to dealing with problems/issues too, like the Airline industry for example, then THAT would be what is Most in the Public Interest overall, but will I see that progressive change in my lifetime?
Maybe, just maybe some of the above small steps in the right direction can act as a catalyst to more from 'adversarial' to 'synergistic' mindsets to Optimally benefit Society overall.
Yours hopefully,
Tony Kilcoyne.
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