Whistle blowing: the ethics of revealing professional incompetence within dentistry.

Traditionally, the dental profession has endorsed the view that one member should not make public--to patients or colleagues--criticisms of the work of another. Recently, the General Medical Council has disagreed, stating that there may well be circumstances when doctors should not protect colleagues from the consequences of their own mistakes. In this paper we endorse this view. We argue that 'whistle blowing' is appropriate in dentistry as well when its aim is to protect patients from the serious harm to which ignoring such errors might lead.