Everyone wants to believe that their dental practice is running as smoothly as possible. Aside from natural bumps in the road, everything is fine as long as you’re earning more than you spend on staff salaries and equipment, right? 

No matter how meticulous you’ve been about designing your systems, you won’t know how to improve without a dental clinical audit. As time goes on, there is always room for improvement. You might think that things work “just fine.” That’s great if you’re content being a practice that is “just fine.” 

On the other hand, if you’d like to reach your full potential, you’ll look into performing a dental clinical audit. 

What Is a Dental Clinical Audit?

Before jumping in to how to perform a dental clinical audit, let’s cover the basics — what is a dental clinical audit, really?

Dental clinical audits became routine procedures for dental practices in the mid-90s. They are tools to measure the effectiveness of certain procedures in a clinical practice. Dental practices use a set of industry-agreed-upon standards to compare with their own results. The National Clinical Audit Advisory Group set these standards.

Performing audits regularly and thoroughly is important in order to assess the progress of your dental practice. There are three main types of dental clinical audits: patient-focused, staff-focused, and practice-focused. By differentiating these audits, you’re able to focus closely on one aspect of your procedures rather than trying to focus on too much at once and having inconclusive results. 

See examples of types of audits to consider below:

Patient-Focused Dental Clinical Audit

• Audit of patient consent to treatment
• Audit of delivery of oral health promotion advice
• Audit of patient satisfaction

Staff-Focused Dental Clinical Audit

• Audit of hand hygiene 
• Audit of child protection training
• Audit of life support training

Practice-Focused Dental Clinical Audit

• Audit of lab return times
• Audit of decontamination instruments

• Audit of patient waiting times 

What Is the Purpose of a Dental Clinical Audit?

At this point, you might think: that sounds like a lot of time and effort! Running a dental practice is busy, and you might think you don’t have the time for an audit — but you should make time. 

Dental audits ensure the present and future success of your dental practice. In order to plan for the future, you need to know what’s working and what’s not. Dental audits will help you design more streamlined internal communication and seamless patient procedures. Before you can fix the problems in your system, you have to identify them by measuring your current success.

Dental clinical audits work to improve the quality and efficiency of the care in your dental practice. 

4 Steps to Complete a Dental Clinical Audit

To complete a dental clinical audit, you must follow a series of steps. 

1. Plan the audit. This includes choosing the type of audit: patient-focused, staff-focused, or practice-focused; identifying your goals; managing expectations; and fostering an environment of open-mindedness among your staff. You’ll want to define, as a unit, what success looks like to you.

2. Perform the audit. This audit should address patient complaints, risk management, outcomes you’ve been disappointed by in the past, and even legal issues you’ve encountered. During the audit, you’ll take notes, make observations, ask for and analyze patient feedback, and measure for success. 

3. Analyze the data. You’ll want to measure your results against the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s standards, the results of others in your industry, and local expectations. There are a number of methods you can use to analyze the data you collected. The root cause analysis, for example, addresses four important questions: 

• What happened?
• Why did it happen?
• How did it happen?
• How can we develop solutions moving forward?

Similarly, you can use more visual methods of data analysis, such as the fishbone diagram or process mapping.

4. Adapt based on the audit. After the critical analysis stage, make sure you’re taking this information and making changes. This audit cycle is useless if you don’t use it to implement improvements in your system. 

Streamline Your Day-to-day Operations with Dental Intelligence

Dental clinical audits prove their worth in all areas of your practice, from assessing the quality of patient care to improving dental revenue cycle management. Take the first step in making your practice the best it can be and perform a dental clinical audit. 

For more information about audits and software tools to improve communication and streamline operations, schedule your demo with Dental Intelligence.

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