One of the ways to assess if something is good enough (in healthcare and other areas) is to benchmark; It's to take figures from somewhere else that you think is good enough and to see whether you make up or match up to those figures.
As I've written several times in this blog over the past eight years or so, my left knee is f*ck*d, and depressingly, it was a huge surprise when I found out that it was f*ck*d.
From time to time, I look into the possibility of a knee replacement, which is definitely coming down the track if I live long enough, but not quite yet.
And so, it was really interesting for me to see (as I was researching PROMs - patient-mediated outcomes from my aesthetic masterclass) that there have been national PROMs for knee replacements for over 15 years.
The NHS publishes pretty much every month satisfaction for knee replacements and knee replacement operations carried out and gives it as a percentage of how many people are satisfied with the treatment they had for an NHS knee replacement, how many people are not, have their symptoms been improved or better, or have they not.
In the most recent update, 32,089 people answered the questionnaire for the Oxford knee replacement out of the 84,575 questionnaires that were sent out.
Of the respondents (and this could be biased because there's a relatively low response rate), 93.3% said they were better.
That is a pretty good result, but you know where I'm going here.
What if, in my practice, we did the same thing?
What if we asked people who'd had specific treatments, whether their life had been enhanced or not?
Would that be enough to show that we're doing our best?
Would that be enough to show people who are looking at us that we were trying as hard as we could?
We've done it, particularly with immediate full arch reconstruction, and the numbers are great; we know that we enhance people's lives by this because we increase the quality of life based on the results of a standardised questionnaire.
Is this something that we should all do?
If we can do it for knee replacements, I'm pretty sure we can do it for dentistry, and I'm pretty sure we can get better than 93.3%.
Blog Post Number - 3972
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