CLINICAL GOVERNANCE IN GENERAL DENTAL PRACTICE (A REVIEW OF LITERATURE)

Abstract

Clinical governance is a key strategy to improve quality of health care services and consists of seven main areas. Clinical Governance was introduced to the National Health Service (NHS) in 1997 as a framework through which organizations are accountable for continuously improving the quality of their services and safeguarding high standards of care by creating an environment in which excellence in clinical care will be established. The aim of this poster is to present results of a literature review which compared different researches and frameworks for clinical governance in general dental practice.

Methods: A comprehensive review of studies of clinical governance and dental practice was performed using MED LINE and Google Scholar databases. Inclusion criteria were: English language publications in Pub Med and Google scholar since 1999-2016. The search terms were: clinical governance, clinical audit, quality assurance and dental practice. Out of 61 publications, after applying the inclusion criteria, 15 were selected for data extraction.

Results: The results of this review showed that the concept of clinical governance in dental practice is new and many countries are trying to establish frameworks to evaluate dental services based on clinical governance concepts.

Conclusions: The Iranian Ministry of Health and Medical Education (MOHME) has promoted clinical governance as a framework for safeguarding quality and safety in all hospitals since 2009 but there was no evaluation tool for clinical governance in dental clinics in Iran. As a result, a framework to improve performance in oral health services is required. It will be informed by the results of this literature review.