Consent compliance
At Showcase last year one of the new products on display was SafeSeen Touch, a solution to the difficult issue of consent, compliance and CQC management. SafeSeen director Chloe Booth spoke to The Dentist about the launch of the new product designed to ensure practice compliance and improve patient understanding.
What are the problems surrounding patient consent that led you to launch SafeSeen Touch?
CB: With an increase of nearly 50 per cent in complaints to the General Dental Council in a year (77 per cent of which were communication based issues) it is now more important than ever to be able to demonstrate informed consent has been acquired when treating patients.
The GDC stipulates that a dentist should not treat a patient if they do not have consent. Consent can be withdrawn at any time, so a dentist therefore needs to be able to evidence that they believed informed consent had been provided on a per-appointment (not per treatment plan) basis. If a patient withdraws consent mid-way through a treatment plan, how does a dentist currently demonstrate that consent had been provided, and that they were acting correctly and within the parameters of the GDC’s Standards?
According to our research at SafeSeen, less than 20 per cent of dentists can demonstrate they have obtained informed consent from patients. That’s not to say informed consent wasn’t given, rather that the dentist cannot evidence that the patient provided informed consent to the GDC or in a court of law.
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