As a Dental Care Professional, you do not NEED to work under a Patient Group Direction (PGD).  DCPs have a choice whether to provide Direct Access to patients or not. If you CHOOSE not to work under a PGD, you will continue to work under a Patient Specific Direction (PSD). This means asking a Dentist for a Local Anaesthetic "prescription" for each procedure that you undertake.  

PGDs increase your potential income by allowing you to practice your FULL scope of practice without the patient needing to see a Dentist. PGDs ensure you have clinical freedom to choose which local anaesthetic and method of administration is best for your patient.

 PGDs will save time for both you and your Dentists as PSDs will not be needed.

The main issues we have been hearing with PSD’s is that they are too restrictive for independent clinicians. Referring Clinicians sometimes do not give enough detailed information within a PSD. For a PSD to be legal and valid, the following information MUST be written in the patient notes:

• Type of procedure
• The type of Local Anaesthetic  e.g. Lidocaine 1:80,000 epinephrine
• The dose of Local Anaesthetic to be administered  e.g. 2.2ml
• Route of Administration  e.g.  Infiltration or Inferior Dental Block

If your referring Dentist does not provide this much detail, then you could be administering Prescription Only Medicines (POMs) illegally. 

Working under a Patient Group Directive will ensure you are covered from a medico-legal perspective and have clinical freedom to ensure optimum patient care.