Most dental journals are research based. As improvement projects do not meet the criteria for research, dental quality improvement reports can be difficult to publish. This limits the number of published examples available to dental teams seeking information relevant to their areas of interest. The difficulty of publishing reports may also discourage some early career dentists from undertaking improvement projects in the first place, further reducing the evidence available to inform future work.
The British Society of Paediatric Dentistry are making a welcome contribution to the reduction of this publishing problem. The group publishes an annual peer reviewed publication, the BSPD Quality Improvement Briefing.
Their 2025 edition is available as an open access publication, which is a great way of expanding access. This issue includes a discussion paper on the happy co-existence of quality improvement and research; the abstracts from the British Society of Paediatric Dentistry 2025 conference, which includes much that will be of interest to anyone interested in quality improvement, and six reports on paediatric dental quality improvement work.
The guidance notes for the journal state that they encourage reports from different settings, and from projects using varying approaches. This is evident in the papers in the 2025 issue. All the papers are from specialist teams, but there is a good range of settings including out-patient, hospital, dental education, and theatre. One paper looks at a community dental service and reports an audit of the use of radiographs before steel crown placement.
This is a great start. The existing work provides valuable examples of dental quality improvement work, clearly reported, that will be of interest to dental professionals in many types of service. There will be a lot of work happening in General Dental Services that is not yet represented but the existence of this annual publication gives one possible venue to share experience. Supporting this initiative will add value to the publication, and teams undertaking paediatric dental quality improvement work should keep this in mind as a possible route by which they can share their work.
Leave a Reply