Abstract:

It is known that at the end of the twentieth century, multidisciplinary approach in dentistry has already begun, and the whole part of dental specialties were required to accomplish specific civil liability statements, specifically on each dental specialty along worldwide. In this sense, nowdays some dental specialties lack of these civil liability statements in some countries, such as happens in México with dental implantology. Even more, it is interesting that the number of dental lawsuits have been raising the previous levels from about 10 years until now. Also both: lay people and dentists, don´t know the main data which involves dental civil liability and even more, there is a void of data of what is happening in Mexico, due to indictments are private and there are not statistics: won judgements, part which has won, refunds, etc. In this milieu, dentists may know during their dental formation, the main aspects which dental civil liability represents. Unfortunately, this is not present in most of the Mexican universities dental programs. In this study a questionary at Michoacana University (Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo) was answered by 3 undergraduate orthodontic dentistry groups of students (14, 13 and 8; students respectively), in order to know how much they knew about the field. Our results showed that the 100% knew that every dentist may have a lawsuit, 19,56% knew the way of a lawsuit could follows, 100% agree that a lawsuit could be prevented and avoided, 65,36% knew what legal documents a dentist may have to defend himself against a lawsuit, 7,7% said that dentist might not pay any refund to a case patient, were 39,1% said that the patient would have to pay to the dentist, but agree in 48,83% that the patient would win a lawsuit, 43,26% said that the patient had the right and profile to give a note: 1 to 10 about dentist treatment, the 87,5% knew patient abandonment concept, 87,5% agree that every date has to be reported, described and signed by the patient as consent. Finally 12,5% of the students know a dentist which had a lawsuit. All data evidence that the most part of the students may need a class in which dental civil liability must be thought, and also, this type of questionary may be answered by graduate dentists to evaluate how much they know about the topic, and even more, some would be eligible to course a continuous education course to know about dental civil liability.

Keywords:

Dental civil liability, dental lawsuit, dentist judgement, dentistry students´ profile.