Abstract

Objective: To investigate the dental practitioner’s knowledge, attitude and practice towards dental implants.
Methodology: This study was carried out from May’2019 - Oct 2019. 752 dental practitioners who were currently practicing were included in the study. A well-structured questionnaire was used for data collection. SPSS-25 was used for statistical analysis. Spearmen correlation was used to find the effect of gender, knowledge and attitude. The P ≤ 0.05 was considered statistically significant.
Results: In this study 80.9% dental practitioners were aware of the appropriate implant material while, 57.9% had knowledge about the types. 30.3% knew about the implant surface modifications whereas 46.1% dentists were aware of possible implant placement approaches. 49.3% believed that the distance between dental implants to be 3mm and between a dental implant and natural tooth to be 1.5 mm. 76% dentists claimed that dental implants have biomechanical complications. Whereas 67.8% knew about the Branemark’s theory of osseointegration. Regarding the attitude of dental practitioners, 28.9% had received implant hands on trainings while 9% felt competent to place an implant.
Conclusion: This study describes that dental practitioners had an appropriate knowledge of each aspect of implantology. Moreover despite the fact majority felt that they are not competent enough to practice it. Thus, it is important that the curriculum, teaching standards, the materials and methods regarding dental implants need to be reviewed and more exposure of hands-on workshops is to be provided not only for the graduates but also the undergraduates during their clinical learning.

Key words: Dental Implants, Dentist’s opinion, Knowledge