Abstract
Purpose: Considerations of healthcare economics make it important to clarify the time required for each type of dental treatment. In this study, we conducted a survey of dentists' estimates of the time that would be required to treat certain patients after reading the clinical information about their particular cases. The purpose of this paper was to elucidate the relationship between the actual chair time and the estimated chair time from the patient's information.
Method: Three patients with edentulous jaws requiring treatment of varying degrees of difficulty were treated by a specialist with 14 years of clinical experience, and the time required to perform each treatment was recorded. The information on the three patients was presented to 20 dentists of our department. We asked them to make estimates of the time each treatment step would take and the frequency of performance of these steps. At a later date, they were again asked to give their estimates of the chair time, after we had shared with them knowledge of survey results prepared by grouping the dentists surveyed by their extent of clinical experience (Delphi technique).
Results: The actual chair time and the estimations made by our department dentists were not different on average. For those treatment steps upon which the skill of the practitioner has a considerable impact, both the actual chair time required for those steps and our dentists' estimations became longer as the degree of difficulty of the treatment steps became greater.
Conclusion: Actual chair time might be estimated only the patient's information. The time study was able to be established without doing actual treatment, by conducting various surveys of dentists' opinions about chair times under varying clinical conditions.
