Analysis on inpatient dental consultations to pediatric dentistry at the Severance hospital in past 5 Years : a retrospective study

Abstract

Objective: The goal of this study is to provide a fundamental and comprehensive report on the status of oral healthcare on pediatric inpatients by conducting statistical analyses on the data of consultation requests to the pediatric dental clinic for the children hospitalized with systematic diseases at Yonsei Severance Hospital for the past 5 years. Methods: The study targeted approximately 2000 pediatric patients hospitalized for the treatment of systematic diseases at Yonsei University Severance Hospital from 2010 to 2014. All subjects had complete records available for consultation and had received treatments at the Pediatric Dentistry Department. The patient data was collected from Yonsei University Severance Hospital’s Clinical Data Retrieval System and the retrieved data was classified and statistically analyzed using Excel 2000 (Microsoft, Redmond, Washington, USA). Results: There were 1203 male children and 932 female children with an average age of 8.9 in the referred patient group. A comparative analysis on the data of annual dental consultation records for the children, ages between 0-18, revealed 0.3% rate of increase between 2010 to 2014, except for a momentary decline in 2012. In all, the proportion of patients referred to the Pediatric Dentistry Department was found to be about 2.5%. Of the 29 departments that requested consultation to the Pediatric Dentistry Department, Pediatrics Department (PD) requested the most dental consultations with 594 cases, comprising 28% of total requests made. The prevailing chief complaint for dental consultation was for general oral examination with 913 cases, comprising approximately 43% of all chief complaint for dental consultation. About half of all inpatients referred to the Pediatric Dentistry Department had only received routine oral examinations without any subsequent treatments. Operative and preventative treatments had been performed on 479 and 198 cases respectively, and 200 cases of tooth extractions had been made. Conclusion: The analyses of the extracted data on consultation requests to the Pediatric Dentistry Department for children hospitalized with systematic diseases have revealed that general oral examination was the most common form of chief complaint, among a variety of other chief complaints. The analyses also have revealed that Rehabilitation Medicine and Pediatrics Departments had made the most frequent dental consultation requests. The prevailing diagnosis on the consulted patient group had been dental caries. While an increasing trend in the general frequency of pediatric dental consultation requests have been observed, further analysis of the collected data have suggested that children suffering from systematic diseases still may lack the appropriate oral examination and treatments. The strong interrelation between prevention of oral diseases and management of systematic diseases advocate for the critical needs to educate the physicians and the guardians for proper care and treatment of oral cavity and ultimately encourage them to make more frequent requests for consultation to the dental clinics.