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Many people signed up to this blog when I wrote about my experience with the General Dental Council (GDC) from 2013-2015. But I had a run-in years before that, that less people know about, but only now am I ready to tell people. 

In the late 1990’s I worked as a general dental practitioner in Derbyshire. 

I had worked as a house officer in Glasgow and a senior house officer in Nottingham and Derby entering VT in 1997 already 3 years qualified and staying on in the same practice. 

In 1998 with a whole host of oral surgery experience behind me, I attempted to take a tooth out for a colleague which had been root filled for a patient for whom we had bent over backwards. 

The patient had presented to see us in trouble because their own practitioner did not have an appointment for a week. 

The tooth had been root filled on short notice by one of my colleagues (very well), but then the patient then attended on a Friday afternoon in pain. 

I squeezed the patient in to my list to extract the upper molar tooth but by extracting the tooth, the palatal tooth dropped into the maxillary sinus. 

I was relatively comfortable with maxillary sinus work as my time as an SHO doing big surgery, but in dental practice it was slightly different. 

I tried gingerly to retrieve the root, but couldn’t, so tacked the socket shut with sutures and suggested to the patient that they come back to see me on Monday to asses what we were going to do with this. 

They attended on the Monday, with limited symptoms, and with more space and time and consideration I was able to open the socket, retrieve the root and provide an OAF closure under local anaesthetic. 

Everyone was delighted and happy, the situation was resolved, the patient was delighted. 

For 6 weeks… 

Patient was a heavy smoker, and at 6 weeks the repair broke down, they were not pleased, but neither was I. 

The patient was very unhappy that they might need to miss work, so I arranged for them to go to a local hospital on the Friday afternoon to have a new repair carried out under local anaesthetic, by a surgical registrar. 

This was all successful with no problems afterwards, but it was only then that I received the solicitor’s letter, claiming negligence and seeking compensation. 

It turns out I had even ruined the patient’s sex life!! 

This case ran through the law until 2003 for nearly 5 years! 

It ended up at Derby County Court, and it took about 15 minutes in court for the patient to give evidence before the case entirely collapsed, and the Medical and Dental Defence Union of Scotland were awarded an “open order for recovery of costs” against the patient. 

I was to receive compensation (I never did) the patient ended up receiving a suspended sentence for not paying their debts and ended up suing their lawyer as well.  

The interesting thing about this case though, is that the expert for the patient who managed to propagate the case for as long as possible, all the way through the process, was also the clinician who then treated the patient in my GDC case after me! 

Many stories to tell and many things to come out. 

At the end of my GDC case I wanted my defence union to write to that said individual, because the holes in their treatment were way, way greater than the holes in mine; but they seem to be somehow protected, somehow Teflon, somehow unable to make anything stick. 

Try not to be too despondent when the letter hits, it comes to us all and it’s hard for us not to criticise or hate ourselves when it happens, but for the moment at least, it’s just a part of the job. 

Blog Post Number - 1990