High Wycombe and Aylesbury Section - Fear of litigation - Stop worrying and enjoy dentistry

What to expect

Join the High Wycombe and Aylesbury Section for a presentation with Len D'Cruz on how complaints arise and how they should be managed, how the GDC investigates registrants and why this is changing slowly and how the profile of claims frequency in different clinical disciplines is shifting.

Timings

18:30 Registration

19:00 Lecture - Len D'Cruz

20:30 End of lecture and dinner

Learning objectives

• Consider the background to the fears dentists have of litigation
• Explore how complaints impact on practices
• Review how the GDC investigates registrants and how that has evolved
• Reflect on how claims and the risk of being sued is changing for the better.

Development outcomes

A and D

Meet the speaker

Len qualified from the Royal London Hospital in 1989 and did his vocational training at Whipps Cross.

After an associateship in Hertfordshire he bought into his practice in Woodford Green as an expense sharing partner a year later and eventually took over the practice with his wife Anne who is also a dentist. He has done clinical assistantships in Restorative Dentistry and Orthodontics.

Len has been a Foundation trainer/Education supervisor for the London Deanery for a number of years and the practice is a Gold BDA Good Practice Scheme member.

It is now a seven surgery practice and the practice is also part of the NHS new contract pilots/prototypes since September 2011.

Len was an Examiner for the Faculty of General Dental Practitioners for the MJDF exam and for the Overseas Registration Exam (ORE). He completed a Masters in Law at Cardiff in 2003 and the Certificate in Practice Appraisal from the FGDP in 2004. He completed a Postgraduate Certificate in Medical Education from the University of Westminster in 2009 and has completed his FGDP Mentoring Certificate in 2012. He was a Director of the BDA (PEC member) from 2015-2019). He has recently completed the Certificate in Insurance from the Chartered Insurance Institute (CertCii).

He currently splits his time between clinical general dental practice, and working with the BDA as Head of BDA Indemnity, having worked at Dental Protection Ltd for 21 years. He is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Bedfordshire for the MA in Dental Law and Ethics. He is module lecturer on the Advanced Minimally Invasive Dentistry MSc at Kings College.

He has published “Legal Aspects of General Dental Practice” (Elsevier/Churchill Livingstone) and co-authored “Understanding NHS Dentistry” with Raj Rattan MBE and Michael Watson. He writes and lectures regularly on dento-legal issues and has published chapters on medical legal aspects in widely read texts (The Principles of Endodontics OUP, Odell’s Clinical Problem Solving in Dentistry 4th Edition Elsevier 2020).

His hobbies include photography, reading fiction and non fiction and trying to keep fit. He has been awarded a Licentiateship from the Royal Photographic Society (LRPS).