A Seven-Year Evaluation of Dental Malpractice Claims in City of Mashhad, Iran

Considerable number of medical claims is annually submitted to the disciplinary court of Mashhad Medical Council (MMC) which a part of them are dental malpractice claims. The objective of this study was to analyze these dental claims. This was a retrospective descriptive-analytical study on dental claims submitted to disciplinary court of MMC during 2006 to 2012. Data including gender of plaintiff, subject of claim, gender of defendant(s), defendants’ field of expertise, the judgment of board of experts and the final verdict were entered into a predesigned checklist. During 7 years, 243 claims were submitted. Plaintiffs were women in 51% of cases, men in 41% of cases and legal entities in 8% of cases. Defendants were men in 81% cases and women in 19% of cases. Eighty-three percent of defendants were general practitioners, 15% were specialists and 2% were denture makers. According to the subject of claims, most were related to endodontic therapy (28%), complications of dental extraction (17%), restorative treatments (13 %) and prosthodontics (11 %). In 10% of cases, claims were about non-clinical issues including advertisement violations and occupational misbehavior. According to the judgment of board of experts, 52% of defendants were acquitted, 22% were sentenced of malpractice and in 12% of cases the plaintiff(s) acquiesced while 11% of cases were archived due to forbearance of the plaintiff. Among the 203 claims against general dentists, 48 cases (24%) and among the 36 claims against specialist dentists, 7 cases (19%) were sentenced of malpractice which were not significantly different (P = 0.4). Among the confirmed dental malpractices, most were related to endodontic therapy (30%). Dentists should consider the possibility of occurring malpractices and to reduce its rate, they should update their professional knowledge and increase their information about legal and criminal issues of their job. Training about legal issues and ethics should be included in the curriculum of dentistry students.