A five-year retrospective analysis (2017-2022) of reported incidents from a primary care-based education provider

Background Patient safety incident reporting and analysis are often confined to secondary care, despite 95% of dentistry occurring in primary care. Peninsula Dental Social Enterprise (PDSE) delivers primary care dentistry in education-based settings and uses a report-review-action process to underpin its patient safety framework. Aim This article analyses trends in clinical incident data, reflecting on learning to improve overall patient safety. Methods A retrospective observational study was employed to analyse incidents over a five-year period (2017-2022) using anonymised data from the PDSE reporting system. Results Over the five-year reporting period, there were an average of 13.1 total incidents per 1,000 appointments. Sub-analysis of reported incidents revealed 1.5 clinical incidents and 0.9 ‘near miss' incidents. A soft-tissue injury rate of 0.6, a contamination injury rate of 0.9, and 0.3 written complaints were reported per 1,000 appointments. Conclusion Patient safety is a key component of quality dental care, especially when delivering clinical dental education. PDSE fosters an environment of transparency, enabling the provider to monitor incidents and learn from them. This results in systems improvements sitting at the heart of the clinical service. With a lack of data published from similar settings, comparison to the sector is limited. Further sharing of data is encouraged to enable standardisation and quality benchmarking.