Dental negligence

Dental negligence definition :

  Dental negligence is a type of medical Negligence for which compensation can be claimed when careless or inappropriate dental work results in personal injury.Dental negligence
Dental negligence
  Once the doctors become troubled they will produce accidental injury due to careless or a few sort of inappropriate dental work.

  One of the finest operation and which is really crucial in dental medicine is anaesthesia and it may be a few sort of a very terrorised operation to your patient but they don’t know that the dental practitioner and particularly us when we're applying in the 4th year might be much more afraid than them when we're injecting the anaesthesia.

Dental negligence

  The dr. Talked about his colleague (she was a female) when they were in the fourth year and at cons medical session and she wants to give a patient a block anesthesia (ID BLOCK) and she was afraid coz it was the first time to give anesthesia and the dr was beside her, she gave the anesthesia to the patient (old man) and asked him in Arabic (3mo 7ases b 5adar b shftk) and he said (no bs 7as ktfe mblal!!!)

  In this situation (as a student) it doesn’t act as Negligence but when you are dental professions and do such thing and you are licensed to do dentistry, we call it Negligence.

   There are few examples of dental malpractice cases in which patients took hefty settlements or won large awards at trial: (Here the Dr. Said that he is talking about some countries where the patient can raise certain law). The patient can take hefty settlement (tswya malya) for simple thing that make Dentists very careful. Let us see these examples:

• Nerve injuries that affect a patient’s ability to taste, nerve injuries that cause permanent numbness in the tongue (or even just part of the tongue). This happen if you injure the lingual nerve if you give anesthesia with Negligence.

• Complications arising from negligently completed crowns and bridges. Sometimes when you are doing preparation in the patient's teeth that will have crown and bridge in the next visit, and you left the patient without putting temporary crowns on these prepared teeth after giving the anesthesia they will become very painful coz of the exposed dentin.
Majority of our dentists let the patient go without putting temporary crown and the patient will feel terrible pain between visits, Or sometimes the  dentist made bad crowns which will lead to continuous gingivitis and  periodontal disease.

• Dentists’ failures to take a patient’s relevant medical history into account before acting.
You will see when you are practicing in the clinic that one of the most important things you will learn is how to take correct medical history of the patient and to record it, some patient may have hemophilia and you want to start extraction and this bleeding disorder may make some sort of complication after extraction which is threatening the patient's life.
It is not the wrong of the patient that he didn't tell you but its your responsibility to take full medical history and record it and sometimes its better for the patient to sign on what he told you coz sometime it may be the patient worth.  

• Failure to detect oral cancer, periodontal disease, or other diseases.
In private sector in dentistry the dentist only concerned about what does the patient told him about the painful tooth, his eyes raised only on that tooth with a cavity but if you look at the other side of the mouth you will see a huge oral soft tissue lesion on the mucosa, which is wrong and this is actually what we call it Negligence.

  You must put in your mind that when you are examining a patient, he is not a model or a cast that you are dealing with. You will be facing law cases regarding the way that you are giving the treatment to the patient coz you are a doctor.

  They (authorities) will not tell you that are good for you, to treat the cavity and fill it with amalgam. No they want you to treat that patient as a human as a whole so never take your patient as a model and try to train yourself from now   when you are practicing on your patient not to treat him as a model.

  As we knew from the perio lec that gingivitis might progress to periodontitis and periodontitis comes with different form from mild to severe. Some countries specially in the united states if the general practitioner doesn't diagnose a periodontal case for a patient and doesn’t refer him to a specialist he will face a law case coz they (practitioner) have understood the natural history of the disease and that if this disease didn’t treated the end result will be loosing the tooth so its their responsibility. They also know from recent research that one of the risk factors of cardiac heart disease is periodontitis, and if you didn’t detect that as a general practitioner, you will face a law case and it might end your carrier (that's happen of course in the developed countries).

• Certain complications from anesthesia, even when releases are signed.
As passing the needle out of the cheek of the patient in case of a dentist (when u are licensed) this is not normal and this is due to Negligence (a normal things that may happen is to touch the bone or you may not get anesthesia from the first time but not passing the needle out of the cheek).

• Unnecessary extraction of multiple teeth.
This is happened a lot when you are a dentist and you didn’t pay a great period of time to your patient, you just want to finish him and receive the other patient and give the anesthesia and tell him to wait outside and enter another patient and give him anesthesia and then re-enter the first patient that you gave him anesthesia to extract the tooth, here you will forget the whole things of that and you may extract a wrong tooth.

• Extraction of wrong teeth (Oh, yes….it happens).
     Another thing you must pay attention to: don’t extract teeth especially when a patient is referred to you from other dentist without any charting.
     Some orthodontist refer patients to extract certain teeth to another dentist and he didn’t do charting to which tooth he wants to extract and this is wrong coz the doctor who will make extraction might extract wrong tooth and the patient can easily raise a law case on you coz this is Negligence.

   The Dr. told us about a colleague of him at cons clinic when he was a student ,when his colleague (female student)  started to do a cavity on a molar, they smell burning from a patient's mouth and when the supervisor examined her work, she was drilling on a bridge not on the tooth, she thought that there was caries. And this is Negligence from her and from the supervisor on her.

Negligence and careless in this profession is so easy to happen.