Why should your dental practice invest in patient safety training?
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Implementing proven patient safety protocols significantly reduces the chances of adverse events, communication breakdowns, and costly errors. By prioritizing safety, your dental team not only enhances patient care but also minimizes legal risk, protects your professional reputation, and helps prevent financial loss.
Did you know? The average dental malpractice payout in the U.S. is $65,000.
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Patients are more likely to return and refer others when they feel safe and well cared for. A visible commitment to safety builds lasting confidence in your practice.
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Tools like safety huddles and checklists promote collaboration, reduce errors, and ensure everyone is on the same page—especially during high-risk or complex procedures.
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By participating in patient safety training, your practice becomes one of the early adopters of a growing movement to bring proven patient safety science into dentistry. This positions you as a forward-thinking leader in your community—demonstrating a strong commitment to excellence, innovation, and patient-centered care.
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Establishing a shared safety mindset empowers staff at all levels to speak up, learn from mistakes, and continuously improve systems—making your practice safer and more resilient.
Why Dentistry Needs a Safety Culture Now
Non-maleficence—“do no harm”—is the fundamental ethical principle of healthcare, and it should guide every aspect of dental practice. Yet, dentistry has historically lacked consistent systems to fully uphold this principle, leaving many errors, adverse events, and near-misses unreported or unaddressed despite their potential to cause serious harm.
Safety isn’t about creating new rules—it’s about applying proven practices. Approaches that transformed safety in aviation and medicine have been rigorously tested and shown to prevent errors and protect lives. At CUSPID Institute™, we bring those same evidence-based guidelines into dental settings, adapting them for real dental practice.
At CUSPID, we don’t just teach rules—we help dental teams think like safety champions. Our programs combine practical tools, team-based strategies, and real-world problem-solving to make safety part of every procedure, every day.
By embedding safety into the culture of your practice, we help teams prevent errors before they happen, communicate more effectively, and operate with confidence—all while building patient trust and peace of mind.
CUSPID Institute™ is pioneering a new era in dental patient safety. By bringing proven, science-backed safety practices from medicine and aviation into dental offices, we offer practices an early opportunity to adopt an innovative approach that few have implemented. Begin your safety transformation with us today.
Hear from Trusted Professionals
"By and large, the practice of dentistry is safe; but being human, there are instances where near misses or adverse events do occur. Hopefully, one can learn from them and move on with little to no lasting harm to patients, staff or providers. In an ideal world, such challenging events would get reported in an anonymous, non-discoverable manner. This information could then be compiled to share with all oral health professionals, allowing them to learn from the experience of others without having to experience the adverse incident themselves. Consider the actions of the Federal Aviation Administration investigating causes and offering probable solutions to near misses and/or adverse incidents in the airline industry. Pilots read such reports as “the fifth gospel,” which contributes to air travel being one of the safest modes of transportation available.
Dentists hesitate to report such incidents for fear of increasing liability and embarrassment to themselves and their practice. How can you move beyond individual safety practices to a more systemic approach to protecting yourself and those you serve? What can you learn from other healthcare disciplines who have been working on their own cultures of safety for over three decades? What steps can you take to ensure that your team is providing the safest dental experience? What is the role of transparency in such a culture of safety? Hopefully, these training materials will ensure that each and every patient visit is the safest dental visit."
Dr. Steve Geiermann, DDS, is a retired U.S. Public Health Service Captain and former Senior Manager at the American Dental Association, where he focused on access to care and oral health infrastructure. He currently serves on the boards of several national organizations—including the Association for Dental Safety (ADS), where he is Immediate Past Chair—and continues to advocate for dental public health, safety, and equity.