Evaluation of reasons for patients visits to non qualified dental practitioners and level of malpractice causing complications

ABSTRACT

To find out the reasons for patients preference to get treatment from non-qualified dental practitioners along with the level of malpractice by such practitioners and resultant complications. A descriptive cross-sectional study. This study was conducted in the prosthodontics department of Islamic International Dental Hospital and includes the data from a two months period from 1st March to 30th April 2014. Our study is based on a questionnaire survey from patients who visited the department of prosthodontics of a teaching dental hospital. Our sample size was 25 patients who were included by convenient sampling. The collected data was analysed by using Microsoft Excel 2013. The demographic results come out to be 72% males and 28% females who have become the victim of dental mal practice. Sixty four percent of the patients reported that the most common cause of visiting a non-qualified dental personnel was that they are unaware of a proper dentist. Secondly, they lacked access to a proper dentist or they had an easy access to a non-qualified dental practitioner in their locality [36%]. Financial considerations were found to be the main factor as most of these families belonged to a low socioeconomic status. These results depict variations in the sources of information and clinical patterns of treatment outcomes. Our study highlights that lack of awareness on behalf of patients to identify qualified dentists, low socioeconomic status and easy accessibility to non-qualified dental practitioner are the main reasons for the patients inclination to get treatment from non qualified dental practitioner. The resultant malpractice especially the self cure dentures, leads to complications which are not normally encountered with recognized treatment protocols in dental practice