Complications and Patients’ Satisfaction on Surgical Extraction of Third Molar

Objectives: This survey aims to study the prevalence of complications and patients’ satisfaction on surgical extraction of impacted third molar in a university dental clinic by senior dentists and recently graduated dentists. Method: Patients who had impacted third molar extraction in a university dental clinic by 2 associate dentists who had less than 2 years of experience and 2 senior dentists who had more than 15 years of experience were evaluated in this study. The patient age, gender, history of pericoronitis, tooth extracted and radiographic assessment of the impacted tooth were recorded. Immediately after suture removal, the patients were invited to indicate their satisfaction on a Likert scale of 1 to 5. Results: A total of 546 patients received extraction. Their mean age was 22.4 and 251 patients were operated by associate dentists. The prevalence of seeking post-surgical emergency appointments was 9.2%. The reasons were severe pain (4.8%), swelling (2.6%), bleeding (2.4%), alveolar osteitis (0.9%) paraesthesia (0.9) and trismus (0.5%). The prevalence of post-surgical complication(s) in associate dentists and senior dentists were 11.6% and 7.1%, respectively (p=0.050). The mean satisfaction scores for associate dentists and senior dentists were 4.17 and 3.95, respectively (p=0.002). Conclusion: Around 9% of patients attended post-surgical emergency appointments in this study. The most common reason was severe pain. Although higher rate of post-surgical complications was observed among the recently graduated dentists, their patients’ satisfaction score was higher than that of the senior dentists.