British dental journal
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British dental journal · Aug 2017
Multicenter StudyThe evaluation of a continuing professional development package for primary care dentists designed to reduce stress, build resilience and improve clinical decision-making.
Introduction Stress and burnout are widely accepted as a problem for primary care dental practitioners. Previous programmes to address this issue have met with some success. Burnout is associated with poor coping skills and emotion regulation, and increased rates of clinical errors. ⋯ The improvements in depression, stress, emotional exhaustion and hypervigilant decision-making were maintained at 6 months. Dentists were overwhelmingly positive in their evaluation of the project and used most of its contents. Conclusion With the caveat of small numbers and the lack of a no-treatment control, this project demonstrated that a self-help package can be highly acceptable to dentists and, in the short-to-medium term, improve dentists' well-being and decision-making with implications for patient safety.