the pressure builds

During the period recounted so far, I became the subject of two group staff actions in relation to patients of mine.

The first incident concerned a patient who had fainted in the waiting room. He had been awake all night with toothache which painkillers hadn't touched, and had attended the surgery as an emergency when it opened having had no breakfast. He required two upper molars extracted. This was a difficult procedure due to the extensive decay in these teeth. Having seen him between booked in patients and removed the teeth, I asked him to wait in the waiting room for the bleeding to stop, while I saw the next patient. The next thing I knew, the staff had alerted my boss to a problem with the patient and he had seen to the patient.

The second incident concerned an obese patient who was in poor physical health, and had also needed a difficult extraction. Having got through this, she was most upset to be told that this was the first of several surgical extractions planned. She left my surgery, and again I was informed by my boss that he had had to see to her elsewhere in the practice. Again, I had not been informed of any problem with this patient.

Both of these incidents were recorded by my boss as Serious Untoward Incidents, even though they occur every day in one dental surgery or another. In the first incident, my boss had stated to me that the operation had been performed 'better than he could have done it'. It is the commonplace view in the profession that the behaviour of the staff in creating, in public, an impression of serious management problems with patients where none existed is not normal and very upsetting for the dentist involved.

These incidents incurred a catastrophic loss of trust between my employer and I. While contemplating how to fix the relationship, I was stymied by the fact that in relation to both patients, my boss had been able to discard the evidence provided to him by his own eyes in favour of the vindictive and abnormal reporting to him that there was a serious problem with the patients.

Shortly after the second incident, I broke out with guttate psoriasis and a strep throat infection, both, I am certain, stress related.