Dental care causing patient deaths?

Who could imagine that dental care could be hazardous enough to cause death? Though uncommon, apparently there have been enough patient deaths resulting from dental care to prompt the state of Washington’s Health Secretary to ask the state’s dental board, known as the Washington Dental Quality Assurance Commission, to launch an investigation.

The Seattle P-I newspaper first published a story on July 15, 2008, that investigated three patient deaths. The article asserted that the dental board’s investigations of these deaths were inadequate.

The dental board took no legal action in any of the cases, and as a result, patients and consumers were sheltered from the information about the dentists involved; only cases in which the dental board initiates action or files charges are made public in Washington State.

A follow-up story by the Seattle P-I can be found here. Staying informed about actions filed against your dental care provider is not a bad idea. In the state of Oregon you can look up this information at the Oregon Board of Dentistry site, located here.

This was posted on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 and is filed in the Dental, Dental Health, General, Legal, Patient Care, Patient Death categories.