So, just before I went on holiday I got word (via email) that our ethical approval for our research database at the practice had been re-approved for the next 5 years.
That was a quick 5 years!
All of this work is down to Dr Kath Hare, my friend and colleague who runs all of the research structures and systems within the practice but just now was a pretty good time to reflect on whether in fact it was worth it at all, to put in all the effort and expense and heartache of setting up a small research department within an independent dental practice.
And so, Kath and I had a meeting yesterday which is our three monthly research meeting (Kath is one of the most well organised and structured individuals that I have ever met) and we were able to run through things that have changed since May and what’s coming next.
The first thing though, from my point of view, was to ask Kath whether things looked different in this first meeting after the ethical approval was granted compared to the first meeting 5 years ago when it was previously granted.
It’s clear to see and safe to say that the impact both organisationally and financially and from a business perspective and from a clinical quality perspective and from many other perspectives, has been astonishing in regards to this project.
It’s fine for me to say that and to boast in a blog which is in effect social media but here are just a couple of examples below of what the research project has brought us and how it has improved our practice in so many ways.
1) One of the projects that has been ongoing for the past 3 years is understanding the impact of quality of life on patients who undergo immediate full arch reconstructions.
As a result of this we instigated a quality of life questionnaire at the start of treatment for these patients and that has improved our understanding of patients expectations, limitations and aspirations.
It has transformed the assessment process for these patients but also the communication that we have with people before they have extensive treatment and it’s also produced an extraordinary piece of research demonstrating how much the quality of life has increased by the treatments that we provide, together with catapulting Andy onto the podium at the ITI Congress to talk about this and further enhancing our full arch course and our immediate full arch master class (coming next month) and our immediate full arch digital course (coming next year).
2) Beatriz Sanchez has taken on a project to assess patients post-operative experiences following different aspects of implant treatment, including multiple implant placements, sinus grafting and bone grafting procedures. She’s been able to evaluate, over numerous cases, how much pain relief people take and how painful things are and what the distribution of pain and discomfit is following a surgical procedure for implant dentistry.
This seems very simple but in fact gives us enormous credibility in what we say to patients and how we explain to patients what the aftermath of surgery will be like.
It helps reduce down the ‘selling effect’ of telling everybody that everything will be alright all of the time and means that we get to the other side of treatments where patients trust us and understand us and know that we tell the truth.
Bea is hoping to present this at the ITI Congress in Edinburgh as part of ITI Live and it will be presented throughout our courses and I suspect in many other places moving forwards, together with it being published when the results are properly collated.
3) The research procedures have allowed us to standardise the use of our clinical management system at the practice (Dentally). This has now become quite an astonishing collection point for data which is simply collected as we go about our work and then can be worked upon at a later stage.
The analytics that we received through the normal day-to-day use of Dentally feed into our research database which has ethical approval so that we can then publish directly off that database without further asking for ethical approval. Kath invented this and it’s complete genius and now, after 5 years, we’re starting to reap the rewards (we knew this would be a long-term project but it’s now creating so much stuff it’s quite unbelievable).
Finally, with regards to the collection of data through our clinical management programme Dentally, we instigated the use of our TecStack to link Dentally to Onedrive and to use Microsoft forms as part of our clinical data collection system.
So, when a patient attends who has a complication we click on the complication report on Dentally and it opens a Microsoft form, we complete the form and it automatically uploads to the complication spreadsheet and all of a sudden we have a huge complication audit and study undergoing in the practice which can then be published directly off the database.
That all sounds great but it actually shows you what type of complications do occur and how many complications you’re actually having.
This may not have been very interesting to you but it’s very interesting to me and it feels like the future of independent dentistry so, it’s a celebration for us amongst the day-to-day and the ‘getting the work done’, the systems that we set-up 5 years ago are starting to blossom.
Blog Post Number - 2824
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