2008 update

Interesting and Exciting Times Ahead

at your

Dental Practice.

2008 is well underway, so a belated Happy New Year to anyone I have not yet seen personally. So much is happening its difficult to know where to begin.

It has been some months since my last posting. This one is quite long but very important since it affects how your dental care will be delivered in the coming years at our practice.

WHAT IS A DCP?

DCP stands for Dental Care Professional. These are grades of workers in the dental field who assist and work under the direction of a dentist but who's roles and responsibilities have now been upgraded. They are all required to be registered with the General Dental Council who oversee their training and protect the public interest. They are also expected to maintain a code of conduct both within and outside the workplace and even risk being "struck off" under certain circumstances, which was not previously the case.

DCPs now include Dental Nurses, Dental Therapists and Dental Hygienists amongst some others.

An important new recruit for us

Leading on from this and as I write this, we are interviewing and selecting for a brand new team member. A Dental Therapist (DT).

I would expect that few if any of you will have heard of this rare breed but they will become much better known over the next 5-10 years. In some ways, A Dental Therapist may be compared to the more familiar, Nurse Practitioners, who undertake some tasks previously reserved for Doctors only.

Dental Therapists have been trained for almost 30 years but their remit was confined to work within school and community dental services, the armed forces and within dental hospitals. However changes in the legislation in the year 2000 opened the way for trained DTs to work in any area of dentistry including general dental practice.

Originally Dental Therapists were trained at New Cross Dental Therapy School in London and were dental nurses or dental hygienists who had undergone a prolonged additional training course to enable them to carry out simple dentistry for children.

You will all be familiar with the roles of both the Dental Hygienist and the Dental Nurse.

These too will be changing over the next year or two. Indeed Dental hygienists as such, are no longer being trained. They will effectively be superceded over time by Dental Therapists but in the foreseeable future both hygienists and therapists will have distinct roles to play in delivering dental care.

The Role of the Dental Therapist

Dental Therapists are now further trained and qualified and registered wth The General Dental Council (GDC) so that they can undertake a much wider range of treatments for adults as well as children.

The GDC has just published a new consulation document designed to decide on further expanding specific duties to be undertaken by each member of the dental team after successfully completing additonal training modules. Again this idea has been around , for example in Canada for at least 30 years !

For much more detail please click this link

DCP Roles and duties

SO WHAT WILL THIS MEAN FOR ME?

Basically, good news! You will normally be referred to our dental therapist for simple fillings, Preventive Resin Restorations (or fissure fillings) and some other treatments .This may mean fewer visits and in many cases reduced fees for "pay as you go" adult patients.

For those patients on a maintence scheme such as Practice Plan or Denplan, as well as for children and young adults in full-time education, whoes fees are already heavily discounted, we will be able to avoid fee increases for 2008, at least, which is great news if the economic picture is less certain, as is widely reported.

I will continue to do all of the more advanced treatments such as crowns, bridges, veneers and smile makeovers, dental implants and root canal work all of which need more planning time and study time allocation.

For anyone who wishes me to continue to carry out all of their dentistry, that will be fine and my normal charges will apply.

Once we have appointed a Dental Therapist we will let everyone know the details in a newsletter.

We will also keep you informed as and when any of our other DCPs acquire new skills and have passed a training module, which may affect who carries out particular aspects of your treatment. This is turn will help keep fees from rising or indeed may enable us to reduce some fees we have to charge, allowing for the additional pay that the DCPs will earn with any added duties they perform .

I hope you see that these are important and in many ways, long overdue changes which should benefit all concerned. All of the details await finalisation by the GDC after deliberating on the results of the present consultations with the professionals and the public.

Watch this space and no doubt the national press in due course !