LocSSIPs Toolkit Dental Extraction

This toolkit is aimed at all clinical dental teams involved in dental extractions. It gathers together recommendations regarding the development of safety standards in the NHS to minimise the risk of wrong site surgery in all dental settings, focusing on the issue of wrong tooth extraction.

Dentistry provides one of the NHS’s highest activity of surgical interventions. Uniquely the vast majority of these surgical interventions occur under local anaesthesia on conscious, anxious patients. This high volume, often complex work, creates opportunity for mistakes to happen that can be devastating for both the patient and the clinician. Wrong site surgery in dentistry may not always cause significant physical harm to the patient such as the loss of a limb, but it is nonetheless potentially symptomatic of problems in the clinical systems and processes of the environment in which it occurs. By utilising simple routine good practice, it should be possible to minimise the incidence of wrong site surgery in dentistry.

Tool kit for ‘Local Safety Standards for Invasive Procedures’ (LocSSIPs) for wrong site extraction in Dentistry

Examples of Good Practice

• Preventing wrong tooth extraction: experience in development and implementation of an outpatient safety checklist ^{_{A. Saksena, M. N. Pemberton, A. Shaw, S. Dickson, M. P. Ashley, BDJ 217, 357-362 (10 October 2014)}}
• Outpatient Surgical Safety Checklist - Central Manchester University Hospitals
• Standard Operating Procedure - Somerset Partnership NHS Foundation Trust
• S.T.O.P before you block - Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals