cummic

Comments

• Posted by kedra May 08, 2020 at 17:57

  I'm a dentist and the whole system is shambolic. We are a private practice and have had partial refunds from our indemnity insurance providers which is with the implied agreement that we aren't practicing during this time. Makes it questionable whether we are currently insured to work if something were to go wrong and we were sued for malpractice.
  
  The reality is we don't have a vaccination, nor the prospect of having one in the near future and there are people suffering toothaches or partway through treatments that couldn't be completed in time for lockdown.
  
  Not sure what the situation is like right now but the lack of PPE or willingness to see and treat patients in the initial weekz was awful. We couldn't see patients as locally there wasn't a clinic accepting referrals. They wouldn't answer the phone. I heard from other dentist friends that they were triaging phone calls from patients in pain and had to send them away with antibiotics or painkillers since the centres had no PPE to treat them.
  
  It seems unethical to me to leave someone in agony simply so I can avoid what would likely be a mild flu for me as a healthy 29 year old. Especially considering that we do have some PPE we always use and are very conscious of infection control already.
  
  And NHS dentists are being paid almost their full pay so have pretty much no financial incentive to treat patients at the moment. The NHS system is an odd one paying mainly for low to no evidence treatments like scaling and polishing for healthy mouths thus forcing dentists to churn through 20 to 30 patients a day with a perverse incentive scheme funding, extremely low remuneration for actual treatment and productive work that's supplemented by grant funding and payments for each registered patient. So no surprises really, this is just another example of the perverse way dentistry continues in Scotland.
  
  It's unprecedented as a pandemic but so is the fear and panic. And that's having a real impact on patients. It's not pragmatic or fair to treat people this way.

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• Posted by Ginger May 08, 2020 at 21:45

  Need to move these comments onto the other site re dentistry

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• Posted by JustANumber May 09, 2020 at 16:36

  I agree with comment above

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