When I worked in maxillofacial surgery (years ago and only to the level of an SHO) there was a head and neck multi disciplinary team meeting weekly (MDT). These are common practice throughout specialties in medicine and in dentistry in some hospitals were complex cases are brought to a committee. The expertise around the table are there to discuss to best way forward for the patient based on a consensus of the experts in the room. As an example my wife is involved in a children’s cancer MDT on a weekly basis as a Macmillan nurse. So Macmillan nurses, community nurses, dietitians, radiographers, consultants, oncologists, surgeons and various other people are involved in the MDT for the patients that are being treated. For some time now this is a concept we wanted to bring into the practice, particularly for a practice like ours were there is an enormous pool of expertise of people who don’t always see each other and I’m delighted to say that today was the first time that our MTD met.
The first meeting scheduled for 8:00 on a Thursday morning involved myself, Neil Poyser (currently consultant restorative dentist at QMC) Andy Legg, hugely experienced surgical and restorative implant dentist with thousands of implants placed and restored. Mark Melbourne, our technician who now has over 20 years experience in implant dentistry and Becky, our treatment coordinator. It may be that the MDT will extend and other clinicians from the practice can add or comment in regards to periodontology, orthodontics and endodontics. For the moment we have a team of people meeting once a week to discuss cases coming into the practice and the best way forward for the treatment of these. Within that group we have upwards and towards 10,000 dental implants placed and restored. There are over 70 years of implant experience in that group alone. We will build the cases on a week by week basis in powerpoint presentations and keep them on our system so we can add to them as we go through the cases, and so we can use them for teaching and collection of data.
Il keep you updated as to how it goes but it’s a model I think for independent dental practices going forward. Once we get it off the ground its certainly something we will shout about to our patients and tell them what we are doing.
Blog Post Number - 1284
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