What do you do if you have a dental emergency? There is no dental emergency room. Hospital emergency rooms are not the answer. Are private practitioners obligated to treat all patients with emergencies that walks through the door? What if it's not affordable and to what extent? There is maybe 1 government dental clinic in each country that may be obligated to treat such emergency. What is dentistry's answer on this issue?
They all end up in the emergency room. Where:
1.) ED physicians give them narcs + abx and tell them to follow up with a dentist in the morning (they don't...they come back a month later with same CC)
2.) ED physician admits the patient for planned procedural intervention
3.) Hospital has an affiliated GPR/Peds/OMFS and the resident is paged in
There are a few private practice clinics I've seen that offer 24h service...but my guess is that the people who need care at 2am are the people who hadn't gone in before because they couldn't afford it...and they won't be able to afford private practice off-hour rates
At my GPR it was an on-going problem...people who elected (for whatever reason) not to have a dental home would wait until an urgency/emergency presented and then would come to the ER for their dental work...some of these people came in with legitimate hospital needs (airway impingement), but most came in for a "hot tooth"...some of them came in for simple restorative...asking if I could place a composite at 4am...most of the time we would pull one tooth (even though 8 of them had to go), then tell them we couldn't do anything more for them until they followed up with another dentist...but i'd see them again 3 weeks later for another tooth (same situation)...It's a real problem...and it costs a lot of time/money for the hospital/state/country.
As a resident I didn't care, it was adventure to yank out some homeless guys tooth at 3am...and the only attending was the ER doc and he had no idea what I was doing I got carte-blanche...but when you start looking at the money country-wide that is spent on dental emergency room visits, it becomes infuriating.
