Effectiveness under evaluation

The importance of practice-based research has been emphasised by Mandel, who considered that "research is not only the silent partner in dental practice; it is the very scaffolding on which we build and sustain a practice". In this respect, a wide variety of research projects may be considered to be appropriate to general dental practice. These include:

The volume of clinical material seen in general dental practice makes dental practice an area of fundamental importance in the assessment of new techniques and materials, as success of a material, technique or instrument could be considered to be its performance in everyday use in a particular dentist's office. Central to good performance of dental materials are their physical properties and ease of use. The assessment of the handling of a new dental material is therefore of importance. The handling of a given material or effectiveness of a device by one operator is necessarily subjective, but when practitioners band together to form a group in order to assess the handling of new materials in dental practice, the results are likely to be more objective. A well-known UK-based group of practice-based researchers is the PREP (Product Research and Evaluation by Practitioners) Panel. This group was established in 1993 with six general dental practitioners, and has grown to contain 32 dental practitioners located across the UK, with one in mainland Europe. It has completed almost 60 projects – mainly 'handling' evaluations of materials, devices and techniques, but with an increasing emphasis on scientific clinical evaluations of the effectiveness of restorations, of which seven are on-going at the time of writing.