Dental Protection’s Malaysian team passed through Kuala Lumpur in April 2012, meeting with members and our lawyers on case-related matters as well as with the present and former Chairs of PCBC, the Patients Complaints Bureau (Mediation) Committee of the MDA.
Four months later we were meeting again with representatives of the MDA, this time in Hong Kong while attending this year’s FDI World Dental Congress. Another Dental Protection lecture there at the end of three packed weeks of conferences, meetings and lectures in Australia and New Zealand; some of the DPL team were away from home and the UK office for over a month altogether.
Keeping in touch
A lot can happen in the space of a month and although information technology can keep us connected to different parts of our life, to different people in our life and to events on the other side of the world, in real time, 24/7, there is really no substitute for face-to-face communication. Over the course of that month the Dental Protection team was able to speak with many hundreds of MPS/DPL members from all over the world, gave lectures to thousands of dentists and other members of the dental team in almost 20 towns and cities, and met with countless lawyers and barristers that we work with on a regular basis, year after year. You cannot over-state the huge benefit and value of doing this.
Dentistry – especially in general practice – is unusual within healthcare in that we spend so much of our time with healthy people who have no presenting problems. When problems do arise we try to fix them and in doing so, we are often capitalising upon any previous relationship we have established with the patient or family concerned.
This is exactly what we do when things go wrong, too. Building strong, caring relationships with our patients not only makes good business sense – it also helps to keep us safe. Those of you who have attended our small group workshops Mastering Your Risk and Mastering Adverse Outcomes, will understand the underlying logic and compelling evidence for this. While in Hong Kong for the FDI, Dental Protection delivered the special ‘launch’ presentation of the third workshop in this series, Mastering Difficult Interactions, to a specially invited VIP audience that included representatives from many national dental associations, including MDA.
All three workshops (3 hours each) are now available free of charge at various venues in Malaysia to Dental Protection/MPS members, in collaboration with MDA. Click here full details of available dates and venues.
In November 2011 DPL reported that it had seen more new claims and reports of cases likely to progress to claims than ever before in a single year, and this had been coupled with a dramatic worsening of our case-related expenditure between 2009-2011. We are pleased to report that 2012 has not continued at that worrying level, but the fact remains that in a relatively small pool of members, in a country with a historically low claims experience such as Malaysia, the period overall since 2009 looks very different from what we were seeing just a few years ago, and that should be enough to concentrate the minds of us all.
There are some reasons to explain this, not least in relation to one or two of the cases which had specific and unusual characteristics, but it is easier to absorb sudden shocks like this when one has many thousands of members and a large subscription pool – neither of which we have at our disposal in Malaysia.
Orthodontics and oral surgery remain a consistent and recurring feature of the Malaysian cases we see, but in recent years cases involving endodontics, crown and bridgework, cosmetic dentistry and endodontics have started to make their mark. We should not be too surprised at this because these are precisely the topics that attract the big audiences at postgraduate meetings, and more people are doing more of these procedures.
Subscriptions for 2013
For all the reasons outlined above, it is necessary to increase our subscriptions by 1-1½% more that the expected rate of inflation over the year ahead in Malaysia. It is worth noting in passing that this is nowhere near fully reflecting the recent case expenditure, but we are trying to anticipate and provide for the true underlying future experience, undistorted by the exceptional features of some of the cases we have seen in recent years. What we will always do is set our subscriptions fairly and responsibly, collecting neither more nor less than we need to do, for the long-term protection of our members for all the treatment that they carry out in the year ahead.
Asia Pacific Dental Congress 2013
Dental Protection/MPS is delighted to be supporting the MDA and the APDC due to be held in Kuala Lumpur next May, at which our Chairman, Professor Trevor Burke is to be one of the international guest speakers. He recently spoke in both Australia and at the New Zealand Dental Conference and received an enthusiastic reception – so prepare yourself for a treat!