Patient safety in dentistry

Patient safety is the absence of preventable harm to a patient during the process of healthcare and is critical to the provision of a quality service. Many National Health Service (NHS) improvement initiatives have been developed in relation to patient safety, resulting in changes in culture, reporting and learning. These include the publication by the NHS England Surgical Never Events taskforce of ‘Standardize, educate, harmonize, commissioning the conditions for safer surgery’ in 2014 which was followed in 2015 by ‘National Safety Standards for Invasive Procedures (NatSSIPs)’. The principles identified in NatSSIPs are now being rolled out to local areas for their interpretation (Local Safety Standards for Invasive Procedures [LocSSIPs]). CPD/Clinical Relevance: The aim of this article is to inform and update the reader on recent NHS England patient safety initiatives as applicable to dentistry, specifically the development of an example LocSSIP for wrong site extraction.