Built from experience.
Designed for better sedation.
A closer look at the software, the audits and the published research behind how we work — and why we think it matters.
Built from experience
Innovation at Sedation Solutions has always come from clinical practice, not the other way round. Delivering sedation across hundreds of clinics has taught us not just how to sedate safely, but what information matters, where variation creeps in, and how better systems make care more consistent.
Our current platform is the third generation of software built within Sedation Solutions. Each version has been shaped by the same question: what do our clinical and administrative teams actually need, in practice, to do this well?
Nothing else fit, so we built our own
We looked at the anaesthetic and procedural-record systems already on the market. None were built for a mobile sedation service. So we built our own.
The result is one connected ecosystem — an administrative and clinical hub, a dedicated electronic sedation record, and integrated patient communication — passing information securely between each stage of a patient’s journey, reducing duplication, and standardising assessment, monitoring, recovery and follow-up across the service.
It’s taken more than two years, and constant feedback from the people using it daily. Most of it is now part of everyday clinical practice; a few newer pieces are still in development or testing.
A foundation for research, not just record-keeping
The structured data these systems generate is becoming a genuine foundation for audit, quality improvement and research. With the right governance and ethical approval, we hope to run prospective research into sedation practice — and contribute real evidence from real-world procedural sedation. What started as better tools for our own team is becoming something bigger: the infrastructure for understanding and improving how sedation is delivered.
The ecosystem, in practice
Four connected tools, each covering a different stage of the patient’s journey through sedation.
Our practice management tool
A live diary of patients, appointments, clinics and sedationists across every practice we support — dashboard analytics, a full appointments diary, and a complete, time-stamped audit trail behind every booking. Everything else in our system runs off this diary.
Structured clinical documentation, captured live
Once sedation begins, every drug dose and vital sign is logged live and time-locked to the minute, plotted onto a running trend graph as the case unfolds — through to recovery observations and Aldrete discharge scoring before the patient leaves.
Your CQC-required clinical record
One click compiles a polished, securely-locked PDF — the detailed, contemporaneous record required by the CQC — with minute-by-minute monitoring, full drug batch and expiry traceability, ready to file or share.
Direct access to your patients’ records
A secure, locked portal — hosted within the Hub — where your practice will be able to view your patients’ sedation records directly. Currently in testing and not yet available to practices.
Also built into the Hub
A Knowledge Hub library of curated literature — journal articles, drug-specific evidence and practical tools, each tagged and attributed — keeps our sedationists working from current evidence, not memory. An Events feed tracks the sedation and anaesthesia conferences and CPD symposia our team attend throughout the year, so professional development stays visible and planned, not incidental.
Learning from every sedation
Selected cases are routed into structured clinical review inside the Hub — flagged with what stood out, and used for ongoing training. Any case requiring a rescue intervention is logged to a central database too, so those moments are captured and learned from, not just remembered.
Rethinking how we score sedation
Sedation depth alone doesn’t tell the whole story of how a case is going. Two of our clinicians, Dr Azher Ashraf and Dr Mohammed Jawad, have been developing a new three-arm sedation scale that looks beyond depth alone — weighing patient comfort and how smoothly the procedure itself is progressing, for a fuller, more practical picture of a case in real time.
Already built into our electronic sedation record and used on every case we deliver, the scale has been trialled by Sedation Solutions for around 18 months. We’re now making the final adjustments before it’s written up for publication — full details will follow once it’s ready to share.
Governance in practice
Being CQC-registered is the baseline. We’d rather be ahead of what’s required than catching up to it — so a meaningful part of our development effort goes into governance and audit, not just clinical features.
Controlled drugs, centrally managed
Every controlled drug we hold runs through one centralised register — stock, doses and destruction all recorded against a named sedationist, nothing destroyed unwitnessed.
Emergency kit, centrally overseen
The same applies to every sedationist’s emergency kit: the drugs and devices they carry are now tracked centrally too, with contents and expiry monitored in one place rather than left to individual logs.
Sedation records, centrally inspected
Each month, a random sample of our sedation records is reviewed by a panel of senior sedationists against the relevant national standards — IACSD 2020 for dental cases, AoMRC 2013 for medical ones. It’s a check on judgement, not just paperwork, with any concern tracked through to a closed action.
The largest published audit of its kind in UK primary-care dental sedation.
Our own sedationist team has completed a multicentre service evaluation of intravenous conscious sedation in primary-care dentistry — reviewing 3,678 of our sedation records from January 2022 to June 2024, alongside a supplementary survey of patients and referring dentists.
Midazolam-propofol regimens predominated (85% of cases). The audit found sedation was delivered safely by both consultant anaesthetists and trained non-consultant sedationists, with no significant difference in outcomes between the two, and no major adverse events, cardiac arrests or hospital transfers across the full dataset. A supplementary survey of 627 patients and 67 referring dentists found 98.9% of patients considered sedation essential to completing their treatment, and 95.5% of healthcare professionals felt propofol-based IV sedation improved the care they could offer.
Citation Botha WJ, du Plessis A, von Backström A, Ashraf A. Safety and patient experience of multi-drug intravenous conscious sedation in primary care dentistry: a multicentre service evaluation. SAAD Digest. 2026: 42(II): 92–97. All figures from a 30-month audit period, January 2022–June 2024.
Not our first study
This isn’t new territory for us. Back in 2015, several of the same team published an early pilot study on patient satisfaction after procedural sedation — 489 patients, 93% rating their experience 7 out of 10 or higher, 92.6% saying they’d recommend it. The postoperative questionnaire built for that study became the seed of the audit tools we still use today.
Lapere C, Roelofse J, Omar Y, du Plessis A, von Backström A, Botha W, Cook C, Bosch G. Patient satisfaction during and following procedural sedation for ambulatory surgery. SADJ. 2015;70(10):442–447.
What’s next
The retrospective audit is the starting point, not the destination. With appropriately governed and ethically approved use of our clinical data, we’re now working towards prospective research into sedation practice — contributing further, real-world evidence for a field where good data is still relatively scarce. It’s the same principle behind everything on this page: build the systems first, then let the evidence they generate make the case.
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