Dentists think they know their patients, and they say or do something that provokes an unexpected response.
This may be because dentists don't know their patients as well as they thought they did, or because there is a particular reason why the patient behaves or reacts differently on a specific occasion. The patient who is under stress or who is emotional for a reason of which the dentist is unaware, would be a good example of this. As soon as it becomes apparent that they are getting a different reaction from the one they expected, dentists need to have the skills to adjust their own behaviour quickly and appropriately. This is one aspect of what is called 'emotional intelligence'.
Another example of a situation where dentists need to be able to think on their feet, is when their are in the middle of what dentists had expected to be a predictable, routine procedure and they encounter an unforeseen complication. It is often the case that when they reflect upon what happened and why, they are forced to accept that they had failed to pay sufficient attention to detail in their preoperative assessment, and as a result they satisfied ourselves (prematurely, and wrongly) that we were embarking upon a 'routine' course of action because we had carried out many similar procedures in the past both successfully and uneventfully.
There is a saying that 'the unexpected doesn't happen very often, but when it happens it is usually unexpected'. The challenge we face is that we actually want to believe that the process will be as smooth and uneventful as on all the other occasions when we have carried it out. Our past successes provide us with a false sense of security. Consequently, these procedures carry a particular need for us to keep our eye firmly on the ball, so that we can see what we need to see, rather than what we want to see.
A good example of this is the interpretation of a radiograph which has been taken for a particular purpose in advance of a particular procedure. Here, the risk is that dentists will be so focused on the procedure that they completely overlook something else on the same radiograph, which could and should have been identified and acted upon.
Dental Protection has more than 50 dento-legal advisers to support you if you receive a complaint.
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