A senior Shetland dentist accused of carrying out inadequate filling work and removing a number of healthy teeth from a patient is to face an industry watchdog.
Steven Lamb will be grilled on a series of charges relating to his work as a senior dental officer at an NHS practice in Lerwick when he appears before a practice committee of the General Dental Council (GDC) in London today.
It follows a 2013 review of 19 patient records from the Burgh Road practice.
The GDC alleges that Mr Lamb carried out inadequate work on a patient, who had two fillings put in on July 16, 2013, only for them to have failed by September the same year.
He is also alleged to have failed to identify that a root was retained in the mouth of another patient following an extraction in May, 2013.
He is accused of failing to identify a tumour or cyst in another patient’s mouth in September, 2010.
He is also alleged to have started a root canal on a patient on August 23, 2010, and failing to complete it until August 29, 2011.
Another charge accuses Mr Lamb of performing a “full clearance” on a patient in September 2009 – removing at least nine healthy teeth – without giving clinical justification and without informing the patient of alternative treatments.
He is further accused performing another full clearance on another patient under general anaesthetic and failing to record that roots had been retained on three teeth.
He also faces a number of charges relating to a failure to monitor the work of other dentists in the practice, failing to keep records for his own procedures and failing to advise a number of patients to stop smoking to improve their dental health.
The GDC will attempt to prove that the allegations against him mean his fitness to practice is impaired for reasons of deficient professional performance or misconduct.