Safeguarding
Safeguarding is about protecting children, young people and vulnerable adults from abuse or neglect.
Safeguarding in general dental practice: ‘a toolkit for dental teams’ is published by Public Health England and you can download it here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/safeguarding-in-general-dental-practice
Surrey Safeguarding
Here are links to Surrey Safeguarding services.
‘Members of the dental team are not responsible for making a diagnosis of child abuse or neglect, just for sharing concerns appropriately.
The most important thing to remember when you are faced with a child who may have been abused is that you do not need to manage this on your own’.
The Surrey Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hub (MASH) should be contacted if you would like to report a concern about the safety of a child, young person or an adult.
Reporting
Serious Incidents Requiring Investigation are rare, but when they do occur we must make sure that there are measures in place to respond to them.
These measures enable us to protect patients from serious incidents and minimise the risk of the incident happening again.
RIDDOR
RIDDOR (Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 2013) puts duties on employers, the self-employed and people in control of work premises (the Responsible Person) to report certain serious workplace accidents, occupational diseases and specified dangerous occurrences (near misses). If someone has died or has been injured because of a work-related accident this may have to be reported.
https://www.hse.gov.uk/riddor/reportable-incidents.htm
GDC Standards
https://standards.gdc-uk.org/pages/principle4/principle4.aspx
https://standards.gdc-uk.org/pages/principle8/principle8.aspx