Impact of Instituting General Anesthesia on Oral Sedation Care in a Tertiary Care Pediatric Dental Clinic

Tertiary pediatric medical centers disproportionately care for low-income, underserved children with significant dental needs. Long wait times for hospital operating room treatment increase tooth loss rather than restoration. Oral sedation has commonly been provided to avoid the long waits for operating room treatment. However, this can be challenging with young, anxious patients. High failure rates and repeat visits for oral sedation have resulted in continued waiting for definitive dental services in the operating room. The Division of Dentistry requested the Department of Anesthesiology to create a general anesthesia program in the dental clinic to increase the use of anesthesia services but align the cost of the anesthetic with the revenue stream. Our aim was to objectively measure the performance of a dental clinic anesthesia service by comparing the percentage of case completions, percentage of complete radiographs, and number of serious adverse events to clinic-based oral sedations. We were also interested in total number of cases completed. We retrospectively studied data regarding an in-office general anesthesia (IOGA) program for dentistry and compared it to oral sedations before and after instituting the IOGA program. Patients received either a general endotracheal anesthetic or nonintubated total intravenous general anesthesia. Successful case completion increased from 88.6% (oral sedation) to 99.5% (IOGA). One hundred percent of IOGA cases had complete radiographs, as opposed to 63.4% for oral sedation. This was an increase from 53.5% from the previous 2 years with oral sedation. Serious adverse event rate was 0% (0/508) for oral sedation and 0.2% (1/418) for IOGA. Comparing 2 years before and after IOGA revealed a decrease in oral sedations from 930 to 508, whereas IOGA increased from 0 to 418 cases. Anesthesia services in dental clinic increased complete dental care and complete radiographs, reduced failed sedations, and were performed safely.