[A survey of removable partial denture works in commercial dental laboratories]

To discover the methods by which general dental practitioners instructed the commercial dental laboratories to make removable partial dentures and to ascertain whether the dental practitioners had surveyed and designed the dentures by themselves or not. The investigations were carried out in two commercial dental laboratories, the results of this survey showed that most of the dental practitioners did not give clear instructions on the order cards. Only a very small amount of the work (5.90%) had any traces of survey lines. Evidence of tooth preparations were found to be 30.12 percent and only 24.22 percent of the master casts had designs drawn on them. More than half the work (70.5%) was given to the technicians so that they could carry out the designs on their own initiative, although it should be the sole duty and responsibility of the dental practitioners themselves.