Treatment planning and reporting

The importance of proper treatment planning and reporting

On average, a dental surgeon at LCIAD spends around 400-500 hours a year on dental reporting and patient administration in the background compared to approximately 1,300 -1,400 hours on actual chairside patient care. This includes:

• Collating and organising patient information collected during the consultation process including pre-operative appraisal of patient medical history and dental questionnaires, writing detailed consultation notes, optimising clinical photographs and creating presentations for patient communication and case documentation.
• Painstakingly analysing each patient case through notes, photographs, radiographs, models, digital scans and CBCT scanning and analysis.
• Making a documented diagnosis or diagnoses.
• Planning an ideal course of treatment to address that patient’s problems with viable alternatives based on the individual patient’s wishes.
• Time and cost planning to be able to carry out the required treatment to the highest documented quality without rushing, but as efficiently as possible. We call this “Stepping Stone Dentistry” to ensure that we can navigate often very complex cases requiring multidisciplinary care over months or years of treatment without ever leaving our patients indisposed or embarrassed between visits.
• Writing detailed professional reports communicate these findings and advice with realistic cost estimates.
• Meeting with patients via Zoom or face to face to discuss their reports and plans and answering emails where patients have questions.

Of course, it is our practice ethos to provide the best centre for dental care that we can. It takes a special kind of professional to be a team member at LCIAD.

However, we also feel that this time spent on behalf of our patients in our own time must have value. Often patients ask why dentistry is so expensive? Correct diagnosis and treatment planning of a case takes time and can prevent many future problems that may be biologically and financially costly if not correctly addressed. It should be remembered that virtually all of this reporting is carried out in our private time, at weekends, in the evenings and away from family and friends, not during practice opening hours. However this allows us to think. It allows us to do what we call “Slow Dentistry” or use what Daniel Kahneman calls “Slow thinking”

Ethical and medico-legal obligations

As time has passed, the medicolegal environment in the UK has increased the demands on the dental profession. The UK is the most dentally and medically litigious society in the world, surpassing even the US and Israel. The consent process is becoming more and more stringent (for more information please see Consent – Dental Protection). It is our duty to each and every patient to ensure that we provide them with full and complete information to make the best treatment decisions for themselves. This means that we provide information about our patients in their reports that they may not have been expecting or may seem very detailed to them compared to what they are used to.

But our experience is that this approach of informing our patients serves them well. We would rather a patient think twice about the implications of treatment than rush into treatment without understanding the possible ramifications of the treatment in the future. This practice is here to look after our patients long term and not just for a single course of treatment. We really think hard about each case and spend time in your absence to ensure that we reach the correct diagnosis and provide the best advice for you. It is gratifying to see that our treatments remain stable and reliable many years after they were provided.

We abide by the 9 Principles set by the GDC Standards for the Dental Profession and indeed teach on the subjects of treatment planning, consent and fee setting in practice for our colleagues. Our practice has been chosen by the largest postgraduate online education portal in the UK, Dentinal Tubules, to provide the definitive interactive course on diagnosis, treatment planning, treatment costing and report writing on a forum providing over 65,000 hours of online video teaching.

Types of report at LCIAD

We carry out different types of report at LCIAD which are listed below together with likely associated costs. These reports are documents representing the culmination of hours of our time based on experience and the will to do things correctly and to a high standard.

They are our signature on the future and proof that we have allocated sufficient time to provide you with the best advice we can.

Dr Koray Feran BDS MSc FDSRCS FCGDent FICD
Clinical Director