After dentoalveolar surgery, most patients are satisfied with telephone follow-up

To estimate patient satisfaction with telephone follow-up and compare the frequencies of postoperative complications between patients undergoing telephone and those undergoing clinical follow-up after ambulatory office-based dentoalveolar procedures.

Using a retrospective study design, the investigators enrolled a cohort of subjects who had had at least 1 tooth extracted during a 2-year period. The primary study variable was subject self-report of satisfaction with the telephone follow-up. For additional analyses, the predictor variable was follow-up type grouped as telephone versus clinical. The outcome variable was postoperative complications. To measure the relationships between the follow-up type and postoperative complications, bivariate and multiple logistic regression statistics were computed. P ≤ .05 was considered significant.

The sample was composed of 364 subjects, of whom 155 (42.6%) had received telephone follow-up. The sample's mean age was 28.6 ± 11.7 years, included 220 females (60.4%), and had had an average of 3.4 ± 2.1 teeth removed. The self-reported patient satisfaction rate with telephone follow-up was 95.9%. The subjects who experienced postoperative complications were 90% less likely to be satisfied relative to those without complications (P = .04). The overall complication frequency was 19.2%, with telephone follow-up subjects having a lower complication frequency (12.9%) than the clinical follow-up subjects (23.4%) (P < .01). After adjusting for differences between the 2 samples, no significant difference was found in the complication frequencies according to the method of follow-up (P = .7).

Patient satisfaction with telephone follow-up was high. The subjects scheduled for telephone follow-up had a complication rate that was similar to that of the clinical follow-up subjects.