From Volume 42, Issue 3, April 2015 | Pages 215-218
This paper explores the implications of the Francis Report for education of the dental team. It considers selection of candidates for training, issues relating to the curriculum itself, including assessment and the importance of listening to trainees. The overriding importance of the ‘informal’ or ‘hidden’ curriculum, through which students and trainees observe their teachers and develop a sense of the professional and ethical culture within an educational institution, is stressed.
Francis could be said to have laid much of the blame for what happened in Mid-Staffordshire on the failure of ‘systems’ but the action, or lack of it, of individual healthcare professionals did not escape criticism:
‘…clinicians did not pursue management with any vigour with concerns they may have had. Many kept their heads down’.1
With respect to nursing, Francis commented on ‘…a declining professionalism and tolerance of poor standards’.1
It is the role of education and training providers to produce clinicians who are patient-centred, who will act as advocates for high-quality patient care, and who will be resilient enough to maintain the highest professional standards in the most challenging of circumstances. Demanding as these standards of conduct may appear, especially to those unfortunate enough to work in dysfunctional organizations, they are nonetheless a fair summary of what the General Dental Council (GDC), for instance, requires of its registrants.2
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