DENTISTS will be required to maintain more detailed records of patients' treatment and keep them for a longer time, under guidelines to be introduced by the Dental Council.
The move follows yesterday's dismissal of charges against a dentist accused of failing to properly treat a patient after the case was severely hampered by her inability to produce records relating to it.
Chairman of the Dental Council, Dr Jeffrey Tsang Yick-sang, said the lack of records had been a strong factor in the council's decision.
'We regret that the records were not traceable,' he said. 'The council would have been assisted by the original records.
'We will review the policy of keeping records by dentists,' he said.
Later he said that while the treatment records maintained by dentists were usually 'pretty adequate', more attention needed to be paid to details.
He said the question of how long records needed to be kept had yet to be resolved.
Dr Vivian Ma, a dentist now living in the US, was accused of disregarding her professional responsibility to care for and treat her patient after her patient complained the work had not been done properly.
The complaint was filed by Maria Lee Tseng Chiu-kwan - the founder of Maria's Cakes - after extensive reconstruction work carried out by Dr Ma continued to cause problems.
However, after nearly two days of evidence and legal argument, the council found that the prosecution had been unable to satisfactorily prove the case.
Dr Tsang said the first three charges - that of failure to carry out proper treatment planning and failure to remedy two separate dental problems of Mrs Lee's - had not been proven.
On the fourth charge, that of treatment employed by Dr Ma, Dr Tsang said it 'may not have been the best method of treatment but the evidence presented failed to show gross negligence as charged'.
Mrs Lee, who has suffered dental problems for many years, said she was not surprised at the result.
'I knew it was difficult to prove because there were no previous records,' she said.
