Purpose: Treatment planning should be integrated to gain and apply essential data to decide. It is necessary to evaluate the endodontic and periodontal condition of the tooth, in addition to its restorability. Treatment planning is emphasized as a crucial clinical skill for a certified dental practitioner in the General Dental Council learning outcomes. The role of dental schools is to guarantee that dental graduates have the knowledge, skills, and competence to choose appropriate treatment options for teeth. The primary objective of our study was to assess the ability of dental interns and recently graduated dentists from different dental schools for tooth restorability.
Participants and method: This was a multicentral, cross-sectional study. Participant recruitment was achieved by sending an online questionnaire to the interns and graduate units at the assigned universities. The questionnaire consisted two parts. The first part record general information about participants and opinions regarding their training of restorability assessment. The second part include five hypothetical clinical case scenarios, where the participants were asked to choose the restorability decisions, rationales for the options, and prognosis of the tooth/teeth. The data was analyzed by using SPSS software version 26.
Results: 104 respondents participated in this survey. The decision and prognosis of all clinical scenarios were not significantly associated with gender, experience, place of work and place of study. Only the decision and prognosis of scenario 1 showed significant relationship with place of graduation. Developing universities graduates showed significantly higher percentage for restorability as against developed universities graduates (p=0.001) and developing universities and recently established institutions graduates showed significantly higher percentage for the questionable prognosis as against developed universities graduates (p=0.018).
Conclusion: The inability of dental interns and freshly graduate dental practitioners to make decisions highlighted questions regarding the condition of learning outcomes and graduate attributes.
Keywords: assessment; dental; interns; recent graduates; teeth restorability.
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