Open Collections

Kumar, Smita

University of British Columbia

Objectives: Our objective is to measure the effect of the pandemic on the frequency and types of dental emergencies. We hypothesized there will be no difference in the number of visits during the most extreme phase of the lock-down. We also hypothesized that trauma and dental infections would remain the same as in prepandemic times. Methods: Retrospective chart review of dental emergencies from 2018-2021, that required dental staff to attend and treat the patient after hours. The data was anonymized, entered into REDCap, and exported to Prism v10.0 for statistical analysis. Results: A total of 283 patients were in the study, 131 were recruited from Jan. 2018-March 15, 2020, and 152 were recruited from March 16, 2020, to December 31 2021. The proportion of trauma versus non-trauma associated visits to the ED (78% were due to trauma and 22% from other causes) was unchanged compared to prepandemic. The following significant differences were found: During the pandemic there was a higher proportion of (A) bike and hit injuries, (B) outdoor injuries, (C) Photographic records taken during the visit, (D) cases treated directly by the attending pediatric dentist, and (E) use of sedation. Note there were no significant differences in types of injuries within the different phases of the pandemic. Conclusions: There was no significant change in the total number or proportion of visits due to trauma or non-trauma related emergencies due to the pandemic. Interestingly, the prepandemic period used in this study had different proportions of emergency visits compared to 2009-2013. In the historical period there were more non-traumatic emergencies than traumatic injuries. Therefore, emergency treatment has evolved, and it was critical that our comparison period be as close as possible to the study period (pandemic). Emergency care is dynamic and during the pandemic, there was a big shift towards taking photographs of the face and teeth. Photographs help the attending dentist to prepare for the emergency visit and are the standard of care up to the present day.

Text

2024-07-10

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/88611

Craniofacial Science

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/