Pat Langley shares some tips on reframing and redefining compliance to make it work for you and your colleagues.
‘Compliance takes me away from the jobs I need to do to drive my/our business forward,’ says just about every dental practice loudly and often.
And they probably say it more loudly and more often in the current challenging economic and recruitment market. There is no doubt that compliance is seen as a burden with few, if any benefits.
But what if it was considered to be a benefit rather than a burden? ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I hear you say loud and clear! Never one to side-step a challenge, my aim in this article is to put forward the case for considering compliance to be a benefit rather than a burden. You can decide if my case rests or not!
My strong belief is that you shouldn’t ‘do compliance’ because the regulators say you must; you should do it because it’s the right thing to do and because being compliant has significant business benefits.
One of the best short arguments for compliance is a quote I heard many years ago from the chief executive of a successful corporate. He said: ‘If you don’t have a compliant business, you don’t have a business’. It will come as no surprise that I agree wholeheartedly with this, and not just for the obvious benefit of being able to stay open! Having a compliant practice will make it more efficient, save you time, money, and stress, and bring you significant other benefits.
Chaos versus calm
Very non-compliant practices are often chaotic with no clearly defined and communicated management processes with team members who are over-stretched and stressed. This often leads either to essential compliance tasks being overlooked or missed altogether or alternatively to tasks being repeated unnecessarily because no one is sure whose responsibility it is to perform these tasks.
Turning this on its head, compliant practices are the polar opposite of this with calm team members who are clear about their roles and responsibilities. In compliant practices, compliance is a team activity where tasks are delegated to individual team members and those team members are accountable for their area of responsibility. This removes chaos and reduces stress.
Feedback
The regulators are all keen to see practices get feedback from their patients and team members and especially keen on what actions practices take as a result of feedback. I would argue, however, don’t get feedback purely because the regulators tell you to; get feedback because it’s ‘business critical’.
Feedback from your patients is invaluable in helping you decide what is working well and what you may be able to do better. Listening to and acting on feedback is essential for business success and also essential for helping to prevent complaints.
Feedback from your team members is invaluable in uncovering hitherto unrecognised and unacknowledged stresses and strains. This gives you an opportunity to prevent small niggles from becoming major concerns. Feedback from team members should be anonymised for best results.
The best feedback to aim for is feedback that is benchmarked against other practices’ feedback scores. Without benchmarking how do you know what an 80% satisfaction score really means?
Handling complaints
The regulators, including the General Dental Council (GDC), all require dental practices to have a complaints policy that is readily available to patients. This has significant benefits other than just satisfying a regulatory requirement though.
Having a robust complaints handling policy and process that is followed by team members who are trained in how best to handle complaints will ensure you have the best possible chance of resolving complaints before they blow up into a full-scale disaster.
Complaints handling is very stressful and any delay in following the correct procedures is likely to antagonise the complainant so that what starts out as a ‘bit of a niggle’ can quickly escalate and, in a worst case scenario, ends up at the GDC or in litigation. I think we can all agree that it makes perfect sense from a business perspective to handle complaints as effectively and promptly as possible.
Maintaining equipment
There are legal requirements for many items of dental equipment plus the regulators require that equipment has been maintained, serviced, inspected, and validated at appropriate intervals and according to legal requirements.
Setting aside legal and regulatory requirements, there are significant ethical and business benefits to ensuring you do this too. If equipment is not maintained according to the manufacturer’s instructions, there are potential consequences far beyond upsetting the regulators. For example, if the manufacturer’s instructions are not complied with for autoclaves you can’t be sure they will continue to sterilise your instruments, thereby potentially putting patients at risk of a healthcareacquired infection.
A further risk is that the equipment will not last as long as they should thereby entailing additional expense that could have been avoided if they had been appropriately maintained.
What’s not to love?
In summary, there are significant benefits to ‘doing the right thing’ aka being compliant. These include but are not limited to:
- Less confusion
- Less stress
- Motivated team
- Fewer complaints
- Fewer significant adverse incidents.
And your practice will be better organised, more efficient, and arguably more effective – plus you get to stay open – what’s not to love about that?
