A new dental unit for both patients in wheelchairs and general patients.
OBJECTIVE
To develop a dental unit to accommodate both patients in wheelchairs and general patients, and to evaluate the acceptability of the new chair for patients and dentists.


METHODS
To integrate a unit for patients in wheelchairs and a unit for general patients into a single dental unit.


RESULTS
(1) The newly developed dental unit could be used for both patients in wheelchairs and general patients and could be installed in nearly the same space as occupied by a conventional dental unit. (2) The dentists could take the home position because of the height-adjusting and tilting mechanisms. (3) The patients could be treated with a sense of assurance because of the wheelchair immobilizer and the safety devices. (4) The dentists could perform patient treatment safely. (5) As patients did not need to be transferred from their wheelchairs, assistance was unnecessary. (6) From the questionnaires, both patients and dentists rated the newly developed dental unit favourable.


CONCLUSIONS
The new dental unit for patients in wheelchairs and general patients permitted dentists to perform and patients to receive dental treatment safely and in a comfortable position. Also, as a single unit could be used for treatment of both types of patients, it required no extra space. Therefore, it has the potential to be installed in the clinics of general dental practitioners to treat both groups of patients.
Tamazawa
Yoshinori
Y
Division of Aging and Geriatric Dentistry, Department of Lifelong Oral Health Science, Tohoku University Graduate School of Dentistry, Sendai, Japan. y-tama@mail.cc.tohoku.ac.jp
Watanabe
Makoto
M
Kikuchi
Masahiko
M
Takatsu
Masaki
M
Tamazawa
Kaoru
K
Yumoto
Nobuo
N
Hyvarinen
Pentti
P
D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D016321:Dental Care for Aged / Q000295:instrumentation; D003730:Dental Care for Persons with Disabilities / Q000295:instrumentation; D003748:Dental Equipment; D004867:Equipment Design; D004869:Equipment Safety; D006801:Humans; D017060:Patient Satisfaction; D018709:Statistics, Nonparametric; D014910:Wheelchairs