Outcome of direct restorations placed within the general dental services in England and Wales (Part 3): variation by dentist factors.

Aim: It is the aim of this paper to investigate the survival of direct-placement restorations provided within the General Dental Services in England and Wales, in relation to the dentist factors which may affect this.

Methods: For this work, survival of a restoration was considered to be the time between the date of completion of the course of treatment in which it was placed and the date of acceptance of the course of treatment when the next tooth-specific treatment was carried out on the same tooth. A modified version of Kaplan-Meier statistical methodology was used to plot survival curves for restorations placed by different subgroups of dentists.

Results: The age and experience of the dentist who placed the original restoration were found to be related to restoration survival, with older dentists having shorter intervals from placement of restorations to re-intervention (P<0.001). Country of qualification seems not to be relevant within Europe in terms of restoration survival, but dentists who qualified outside Europe achieve different restoration survival times for the restorations that they place. Dentist's gender has no relationship with time from restoration to re-intervention.

Conclusions: Dentist factors such as age, country of qualification, and employment status, but not the gender of the dentist, have been found to influence the survival of directly placed restorations.