Blundering dentists pulled out almost 150 HEALTHY teeth over a five-year period, new study finds
- Researchers warn the true number may be higher than official figures suggest
- They also warn that attempts to tackle the problem appear to have failed
- Dentist error payouts can be as high as £40,000, depending on the blunder
Hundreds of patients have had the wrong teeth removed by bungling dentists, a study has found.
Many have lost perfectly healthy teeth as a result of the blunders.
Researchers warn that attempts to tackle the problem appear to have failed and the total may be much higher than official figures suggest.
Wrong tooth removal is classed by the NHS as a ‘never event’ – something that should never happen, such as leaving surgical equipment inside a patient’s body.
Pulling out the wrong tooth accounts for up to one in four surgical never events.
Researcher Dr Mike Pemberton said the true number of wrong teeth removed is likely to be much higher because reporting systems are ‘complex and obtuse’ (file photo)
Researchers from the University Dental Hospital of Manchester looked at tooth removals in England from 2015 to 2019. Over the four-year period, dentists extracted almost 150 healthy teeth by mistake.
Most of these blunders occurred in hospital, where patients had extractions under general anaesthetic.
Just 17 were removed by primary care dentists, according to results published in the British Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery.
In 2015/16 there were 33 accidental extractions and in 2018/19 there were 42, the study found.
Researcher Dr Mike Pemberton said the true numbers are likely to be much higher because reporting systems are ‘complex and obtuse’.
Around 45,000 extractions a year are carried out by dentists in the UK – at a cost of over £200million.
Payouts for dentists’ errors can range from £1,000 to £40,000 depending on the scale of the blunder. Most mistakes happen due to poor communication between dental staff or a failure to check X-rays.
In 2019, a dental surgeon at Liverpool University Dental Hospital was suspended for eight months after he took out the wrong tooth and lied to his bosses about it.
Around 45,000 extractions a year are carried out by dentists in the UK – at a cost of over £200million (file photo)
Dr Michael Patrick Winston, who had 30 years’ experience, wrongly claimed he had immediately informed the patient of the slip-up.
He failed to record the error in the patient’s medical notes and encouraged a dental nurse to ‘be vague’ about the matter if asked.
Dr Winston also failed to refer to an X-ray highlighting the tooth that needed removing.
And in 2017 dental surgeon Dr Panagiotis Stathopoulos was struck off from Royal Derby Hospital after trying to cover his tracks when he wrongly removed two healthy teeth from a patient.
He later altered the patient’s notes to suggest he deliberately took them out after concluding they were the ones causing the pain.
Dr Stathopoulos was found guilty of lying by a Medical Practitioners Tribunal panel and subsequently removed from the GMC medical register.
Eddie Crouch, of the British Dental Association, said there was no excuse for patients being made to suffer from dentists’ incompetence.
But he stressed the number of wrong removals was still tiny compared to the total annual rate of extractions.
‘Unless there are clear signs of decay on an X-ray, it can be very difficult to tell which tooth pain is coming from,’ Mr Crouch said.
‘In the vast majority of cases, the dentist gets it right,’ he added.