Prospective survey of percutaneous injuries in orthodontic assistants.

This prospective diary survey provides documentation concerning the occurrence of percutaneous injury among orthodontic chairside assistants in the United States and Canada. A 20-day period was used to collect data regarding exposure to injuries; 693 valid responses were received from orthodontic assistants. Most chairside assistants in this sample work in a solo practice and average 33 hours per week treating patients for 49 weeks per year. The study identified a percutaneous injury rate of 0.11 for chairside assistants during this period, a rate than can be extrapolated to 1.4 episodes of percutaneous injury per year per chairside assistant. The majority of these injuries occurred outside the mouth. Those assistants with longer orthodontic experience had a lower injury rate than those with less experience. The rate of percutaneous injury to dental assistants was slightly higher than the annual rate (0.99) for orthodontists monitored by means of a companion survey and slightly lower than the rate (1.9) for a smaller sample of orthodontists from the American Dental Association survey of 1995. The annual rate of percutaneous injury for orthodontic chairside assistants is less than half of that observed for dentists in general practice.