Antimicrobial prescribing for general dental practitioners

  • N. O. Palmer
(Ed) FGDP(UK) price £20 for FGDP(UK) members and foundation dentists and £25 for non-members; pp 63 ISBN 9780954345174 | ISBN: 978-0-9543-4517-4

This is a small A5 sized, 63-paged, easy-to-read, excellent reference book. It is split into 13 chapters, which cover topics from prescription writing to antifungal therapy, with topics like management of acute dentoalveolar infections in between. Each topic is covered in enough detail for this book to be useful when in a hurry, as it bullet-points the steps that need to be taken when dealing with a condition, for example what the initial assessment needs to consist of and what further steps, if any, need to be taken.

The green boxes in each chapter highlight the different medicinal regimens for each condition and the summary flow charts are brilliant for enlarging and printing off for the rest of the team.

This book is particularly useful as it gives both adult and children's doses and the end of each chapter contains a reference list, allowing you to investigate further if you wish. Although it may seem it is aimed only at general dental practitioners, it also covers what to do in cases of implant placement, creation of oral-antral communications and periodontal surgery, so it would be useful for those practitioners who carry out more advanced treatments.

I found this book to be a good adjunct to the BNF and useful when treating patients. My colleagues have also commented on how handy it is, although one criticism is that it would be easier to navigate if it had side tabs with chapter names as this would assist in finding the appropriate chapter more quickly. Despite this, it is overall a very good and helpful book to have in the surgery and I would recommend that practitioners go and get a copy.