It only takes one lawsuit to derail an otherwise successful dental practice. Risk assessment is an important process for dental practice owners. Working with a risk assessment attorney can help you protect your dental practice from potential patients who believe they’ve been wronged. Putting best practices in place for informed consent, the doctor-patient relationship, and documentation can help protect your dental practice.
What does a dental practice risk assessment include?
During our risk assessment process, we will consider the following common issues that could create unnecessary risks at your dental practice:
- Radiological protection
- Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)
- Infection control
- Patient record keeping, including keeping updated medical histories
- Health and safety, including slip and fall prevention and safe work equipment
- Consent and Mental Capacity Act
- Recording registration details
- Latex allergy prevention
- Child protection practices
- Safeguarding of vulnerable adults
- Asbestos
- Data protection and confidentiality
- Handling of medicines
- Referral within and outside of the dental practice
- Payment mentions
- Communication with patients
- Collecting and acting upon staff feedback
- Violence, harassment, and bullying
- Adverse incidents in the past
- Recruitment and staffing practices
- Medical emergencies, including emergency equipment and drugs
Plus, we can help you develop an effective complaint handling strategy as well as assess your insurance practices against common risks.
We will consider the level of impact and the adverse events that could occur, and the likelihood that they will recur, based on your current practices. Next, we will work with you to lower your risk factor and implement a plan.
How Can Risk Assessment Help My Dental Practice?
Taking the time to conduct a risk assessment can help protect yourself, your dental practice, and your patience. Risk assessments also help you understand any areas in which you may not be complying with the law. Engaging in a risk assessment will help you focus on the risk that matters in your dental practice. You will be able to narrow down the risks with the potential to cause significant financial consequences for yourself in your practice.
When you engage in risk assessment and management, you will use your resources to minimize the risk of adverse incidents or outcomes happening at your dental practice. If a negative incident or outcome has already occurred, you can use the risk assessment to learn from the situation and prevent a similar situation from happening in the future.
Minimizing Risk Through Effective Complaint Handling
As part of our risk assessment services, we will help you and your dental practice develop a procedure for handling patient complaints. Putting best practices into place will help you avoid patient complaints regardless, but having a strategy to effectively address them when they occur is crucial. The first step is to identify the hazard. Perhaps a patient feels like they are not being listened to by the dental practice. The next step is to assess the risk. If your staff members haven’t been trained in how to handle patient complaints, the risk may be high.
How to Manage Patient Complaints
After assessing the risk, your team will need to control or handle the risk. We can help you develop practices for listening to a complaint adequately and handling it in a way that avoids escalation outside of the dental practice. Another aspect of controlling the risks involves keeping detailed logs of all the complaints and all the solutions that have been offered.
Management should have a system in place to review how staff members have handled complaints and make changes to handle them better in the future. In most cases, the better organized the dental practice, the higher the patient satisfaction level. Handling complaints in an organized and transparent matter can help you increase your patient satisfaction levels and avoid costly litigation.
Risk Management & Insurance Practices
As part of our risk assessment services, we will help you evaluate whether your current insurance practices work for your company. As part of this review, we will consider the different types of insurance your dental practice uses and whether your policies are adequate to protect you and your practice.
General liability insurance is a crucial way to protect your business against claims brought by patients or other visitors who are harmed on your premises due to accidents that are not related to conducting a dental procedure. For example, a delivery person may trip on a cord in your hallway and become injured. In this case, your general liability insurance should provide blanket coverage for the claim.
Medical malpractice insurance can protect you against claims brought by patients claiming that another dentist’s negligence caused an injury. Finally, you may want to consider commercial property insurance to protect your practice from unexpected events such as floods, fires, or theft.
Discuss Your Case With a Dental Practice Lawyer
When you work with the risk assessment attorneys at Mahan Dental Law, we will thoroughly evaluate your dental practice and give you workable strategies to reduce your liability risk. The best time to prevent litigation is before it happens through risk assessment and management. Contact Mahan Dental Law today to schedule your initial consultation and learn more about how we can help you protect yourself from unnecessary litigation.
Mahan Dental Law helps their clients with dental practice risk assessment throughout the United States including the states of Ohio and Kentucky.
