Finbar O'Mahony reflects on his first six months in dental practice and gives advice on overcoming the challenges both in performing the dentistry and dealing with your patients.

General Dental Practice is an area of work that demands a complex set of skills and knowledge. Vocational Training (VT) in Scotland or Foundation Training (FT) in England and Wales is the established means of developing these skills in newly qualified dentists.

Sami Stagnell explains his experiences working in his first practice.

John Tiernan, Director of Educational Services at Dental Protection explains the importance of the original patient record when your clinical skills face a legal challenge and emphasises the consequences if a dental professional changes a clinical record in an attempt to cover up a mistake.

Moments arise in all of our lives when reactions occur or decisions are made in an instant but which will have repercussions for months or years to come.

Asking for payment, explaining costly treatments and broaching the subject of bad debts can all be difficult and unfamiliar in the early years of practice. Whilst at dental school, many undergraduates transform the business of asking for money almost into an art form; with the bank manager's direct line stored prominently in the mobile in case urgent funding for an emergency (such as an elective in Aruba) is instantly required! However, on graduating and moving into practice, some dentists find themselves feeling strangely uncomfortable when it comes to asking for payment.

Leaving one dental practice and starting afresh is an exciting time, especially when you have a long career in front of you that is full of opportunities. It may therefore seem odd to be thinking about how you are going to leave a practice when some of you are only just beginning to settle in, but there are some important considerations to keep in mind for the future.

Corporate dentistry has taken an increasing share of the NHS dental market since the inception of nGDS in 2006. The largest player, IDH, has slowly and quietly acquired more and more practices and contracts.

Joe Ingham explains why some practice owners and associates don’t always agree during their professional relationship.

This article critiques working in a regionally based versus a metropolitan practice in the early phase of your dental career, highlighting the adventures, advantages and pitfalls of each.

Raising finance for purchasing a practice is becoming more difficult, despite funds being available and European finance guarantees in place to assist.

The VT process is always changing and it is always under review. Do not make any assumptions and especially don't rely on information from last years candidates.Thoroughly research into the different Deaneries/Postgraduate Centres and their procedures

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Not only is the prevalence of tooth surface loss (TSL) increasing, but clinicians increasingly find themselves facing criticism and challenges regarding its diagnosis and management.

Sadly the dental surgery environment is not always conducive to effective communication. Often the dentist and other members of the dental team are dealing with a variety of patients, all with different needs, and they may be subject to severe time pressures.

There are many examples in clinical dentistry of treatment which is largely dependent upon the level of co-operation from the patient, and/or the degree to which the patient follows the advice and recommendations of the clinical team.

One of the advantages of keeping careful and detailed records of a patient’s pain history is that it highlights significant changes and developments in the features of the patient’s symptoms which can, in turn, lead the clinician to the correct diagnosis.

New techniques, new materials and perhaps more importantly, a shift in treatment philosophies in recent years has led to a greater emphasis upon minimally interventive, preventive approaches to the management of the early carious lesion. In some key respects new technology has helped, and in other respects it has hindered, this process. In a dentolegal sense, the most likely allegation would be that the clinician failed to recognise, act upon and appropriately manage the small or early carious lesion and as a result it was allowed to develop, causing pain and suffering together with the cost and inconvenience of more extensive (and more expensive) treatment.

People are living longer, and more people are retaining their teeth into later life. Consequently, the overall potential periodontal risk is rapidly increasing. Most allegations of undiagnosed, untreated and under-treated periodontal disease arise when a patient sees a new dentist for the first time. This may result from the retirement of the patient’s previous dentist, or simply because the dentist has left the practice. Sometimes the patient attends a different dentist in an emergency situation, or following the sale of the practice where they have been treated over many years.

In case after case, the question arises of what information a patient was given in advance of their treatment. Obviously, this is material to the quality of the consent obtained from the patient, and yet dentists, hygienists and therapists often find themselves unable to demonstrate with any certainty, exactly what the patient was told, when, and in what terms.

Dentists communicate with their technicians (and vice versa) in a variety of ways, and on a variety of subjects. Yet in the experience of Dental Protection, many valuable opportunities to improve the quality of these communications seem to be missed. Although there has to have been some dialogue, there is often little or no tangible evidence that this was so.

We believe that we are uniquely placed to appreciate the role that CPD can play in the areas of professional performance, patient safety and the quality of patient care.