Dental phobia or anxiety of patients is the serious impediment to appropriate and effective dental treatment. Sedative technique helps to mitigate patients' fear and anxiety thus make them more cooperative and familiar to dental practices. With increasing attention to sedative dentistry in dentists, educational requirements and technical qualification also become stricter but actual survey on recent sedative dentistry has not been reported yet. Especially there is insufficient study reporting the survey of sedative dentistry subjected to Korean adults. In this paper, we conducted a survey study on the actual condition and practice related to sedation with a questionnaire to dentists in South Korea.

The survey was done for members of The Korean Dental Society of Anesthesiology (KDSA), who had great interest in sedation and for whom survey-by-mail was convenient. 472 members of The KDSA having dental license and solid address and contact information were subjected to the survey by sending them survey questions about their sedative techniques and knowledge. In order to increase the response rate, small gifts were presented to those who accurately responded to the survey questions and text messages and phone calls were made to encourage their participation. We collected their responses over two months and examined the returned surveys. Statistical analysis was performed using IBM SPSS Statistics 21 for each question.

Out of 472 dentists, 181 responded (38.4% response rate). 63.0% (114 dentists; 77 male and 37 female) of respondents had experience on sedative technique and their average age was 39.8 ± 7.6 year. 74 of them were private practitioners, 17 of them were professors (14.9%), 11 of them were dentists-in-service (9.6%), 11 of them were residents (specialist training) (9.6%) and 1 of them was military doctors (0.9%). There were 89 dentists (78.1%) who were specialists or receiving trainings to be specialist, most of whom were pediatric dentists (55, 48.2%) and oral surgeon (31, 27.2%). The most popular route for drug medications was orderly oral, inhalational, intravenous medication. Combination of oral and inhalational medications or single use of intravenous medication was the most common. The most preferred sedative drug was pocral in oral sedation and midazolam in intravenous sedation. 48.2% of practitioners responded that they experienced side effects and emergency situations. Airway obstruction was the most frequent.

Results from the survey show that the protocol and system for sedative dentistry have been improved compared to the past. Nevertheless, quality of emergency protocol, monitoring devices and preparation of sedative drugs was still insufficient to achieve safe sedative procedure. This study acquires novelty since actual survey on recent sedative dentistry for adult patients has not been reported yet.