Classification of patients may help in providing important insights for designing an appointment system considering different sequencing schemes and adjustments of inter-appointment times.
The individual block variable interval appointment rule, i.e., scheduling a single patient at a time with inter-appointment times adjusted according to the mean service times of patient class performs best.
Some of the problems of root canal treatment are post-obturation pain, inter-appointment pain and swelling.
Data collected included pulp vitality status, the presence or absence of pre-operative, inter-appointment and post-obturation pain.
When a second visit was required, a calcium hydroxide dressing was used as an inter-appointment dressing.
Despite the fact that calcium hydroxide is recognized as the standard intracanal medicament for inter-appointment dressing [ 17], it was used by only 11.5% of the respondents.
Otherwise (for the multiple-visit group), non-setting 35%% calcium hydroxide paste (UltraCal XS, Ultradent, South Jordan, UT, USA) was used as inter-appointment medication.
One of the reasons might be that it takes longer to remove the inter-appointment medicament and to dry up the root canal before obturation.
For those teeth assigned to multiple-visit group, non-setting 5 % calcium hydroxide paste (UltraCal XS, Ultradent, South Jordan, UT, USA) was used as inter-appointment medication.
As the maximum inter-appointment duration is usually not longer than a year, we could assume that cases seen after August 2001 with no prior database records were correctly classified as having no prior appointments.
Calcium hydroxide has limitation, the base water is acidic because it is self-regulating and does not raise the pH, and a variety of agents have been introduced as inter-appointment medicaments.
