Surgical Guidelines for Dental Implant Placement

The goal of implant surgery is to provide reliable support for a restoration that can satisfy a patient’s functional and aesthetic expectations. To achieve this goal, interdisciplinary planning amongst restorative and surgical disciplines is required with a clear understanding of patient needs. Patient expectations should be carefully evaluated and at times adjusted to ensure a realistic outcome with presenting anatomical, systemic and local patient-specific risk factors. The term “restorative-driven” treatment planning is used to refer to interdisciplinary and patient-centred planning (Garber, Compend Contin Educ Dent 16:796–804, 1995). Such planning requires input form members of different disciplines such as restorative, surgical, orthodontic and endodontics to develop an interdisciplinary treatment plan. Treatment planning should include patient’s: The goal of such detailed planning is to align patient expectations with achievable treatment outcomes prior to initiating treatment based on patient-specific risk factors for implant therapy. Only when the goals have been defined can the sequence of therapy be established, and then patients can be informed about the extent of their treatment and the options available for their treatment (Zitzmann NU, Margolin MD, Filippi A, Weiger R, Krastl G. Patient assessment and diagnosis in implant treatment. Aust Dent J. 2008;53(Suppl 1):S3–10; Spear F. The challenges of presenting interdisciplinary treatment. Adv Esthet Interdiscip Dent. 2005;1:2).