Patient Safety in oral health for every newborn and every child 

“Safe care for every newborn and every child” is the theme for World Patient Safety Day in 2025. Whilst raising the profile of patient safety through a dedicated day is important, patient safety in dentistry is, of course, an everyday topic of crucial importance to firstly our patients, but also to our profession and thirdly to regulators. Patient safety is at the core of everything we do at The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh so, what better topic for my blog this month than patient safety for every newborn and every child. The World Health Organisation slogan to accompany this year’s theme is “patient safety from the start” to recognise the vulnerability of babies and children to the risks and harms caused by unsafe care. 

Key to patient safety in dentistry involves following the crucial steps in a guideline, guidance document, policy, procedure manual, standard operating procedure or any other clinical governance document designed to reduce risk, eliminate hazards and ensure overall compliance with the avoidance of all sources of patient harm. As a Faculty, we support all of these as extremely valuable ‘in-office’ methods of ensuring our dental patients do not suffer the unwanted and undesirable during diagnosis and treatment. Patient safety in dentistry is multidimensional though and as the dental industry continually re-invents itself, and as new techniques and technologies come on stream, the phrase “innovate or imitate” is of importance in the wellbeing of our patients when undergoing dental care. Innovation in patient safety is as important as imitating the tried and tested procedural steps ensuring our patients receive the best care available.  

But what about the other aspects of dental patient safety? There is more to the patient safety story, and this requires due consideration. Regular readers of the Dental Dean Blog will know that in 2025, I have tangentially explored the wider aspects of patient safety through the variation in numbers of dentists and dental care professionals across the world, dental tourism, digital dentistry and direct to consumer dentistry as well as the factors that influence access to dental care globally. The world is a big place and with 195 countries recognised by the United Nations, there is a lot to do in terms of promoting optimal oral health for the younger generation across the 57.5 million square miles of land on our planet. Whilst eleven babies have been born on Antarctica, patient safety for babies and children remains foremost for the six more populous continents.  

Patient safety for newborns and children is complex. At the heart is the fact that they have a right to good oral health and the best way to ensure patient safety for the next generation is the prevention of treatment need in the first place. The current WHO Global Oral Health Status Report is rightly sub-titled “Towards universal health coverage for oral health by 2030” which is a big ask. Newborns and children should be provided with the best conditions to thrive and as a global community, we should be pushing for much greater controls on advertising sugar containing food and beverages to children, addressing the high levels of free sugars found in commercial food for babies and young children; and of course, dealing with the inequalities. The lack of access to care in many parts of the developing and developed world, cultural belief practices impacting on oral health, and safeguarding the needy and vulnerable should not be ignored either. 

Inevitably newborns rely on the adults caring for them to make both conscious and competent decisions in relation to their welfare and as children grow and mature, the point is reached when they can make their own treatment decisions. Disabilities and cognitive impairment complicate this, and of course, no two children are identical, with individual needs and preferences varying. Perhaps the time has come to consider including patient safety in the various methods of direct to patient dental education so that as children mature, they can consider their own safety rather than relying exclusively on the adults around them? Through the myriads of digital access platforms, the dental profession has the ideal set of tools to provide patient safety material for our younger patients. Today’s children are tomorrow’s adult citizens and as we all know, the technology native generations are significantly more digitally literate than Generation X and Millennials. 

It goes without saying that the Faculty of Dental Surgery supports the international approaches to the exchange of best practices, research and policy across the world, and through our sister Faculty of Dental Trainers, to ensure that those involved in education also adhere to the highest common standards. To make big strides in the patient safety improvement journey across the world, the following principles of action need to be considered by policymakers and governments: infrastructure investment in lower income countries, adoption of the highest standards of care to bridge the inequalities gaps, continued public engagement in both the prevention and treatment of dental disease, and of course meta data based research to track adverse events and identify interventions that do not have the desired positive somatic and oral health outcomes and impact.  

September is also timely for the Faculty to be thinking about patient safety in relation to children’s dentistry. This month, the College hosts the “Smiles Across the Globe” joint meeting being run by the American Academy of Paediatric Dentistry, European Association of Paediatric Dentistry and our own Faculty of Dental Surgery. The conference covers a series of very important topics involved in the patient safety agenda including the power of AI, minimally invasive dentistry in the USA and European continent, and the evergreen hot topic of endocarditis prevention in dentistry. If you haven’t managed to secure a place, there is the option to sit in your comfy armchair with the popcorn (sugar-free of course) and be a ‘catch-up’ participant AAPD | Smiles Across the Globe. As education is a key aspect of safety in healthcare, join in online and learn from the range of experts. On a personal note, I am looking forward to welcoming so many Paediatric Dentists from across Europe and the USA to our College. 

Coming to a close, patient safety is a key component of quality dental care, but unfortunately still remains to be unevenly implemented across the world. As oral health becomes increasingly implicated in overall wellbeing, patient safety in dentistry should be ‘dialled up’ the agenda by oral health leaders, teachers, policy makers and practitioners in order to guarantee safety across everything we do in dentistry. Collective action across the globe is needed to determine that our patients are safe, no matter where in the world they live, particularly for newborns and children who deserve the best start in life. Therefore, as a Faculty, we strongly believe in ‘Safe care for every newborn and every child’ and provide full endorsement of this aspect of the patient safety initiative. Patient safety should always be from the start. 

I enjoy hearing directly from our Members and Fellows on any issue, so please feel free to get in contact dental@rcsed.ac.uk