Lateral thinking skills for chairside decision making among dental professionals in Tamilnadu, India- a cross-sectional study

Background: Lateral thinking in general helps to find new alternate way for many problems and helps to solve the issues in the most simple and efficient way. Aim: This study aims to find out the lateral thinking skills for chairside decision making among dental professionals in Tamilnadu, India. Materials and Method: A cross-sectional study was conducted among 159 dental professionals in Tamilnadu based on the simple random sampling method to evaluate the usage of lateral thinking skills for chairside decision making. A questionnaire consists of 15- itemssuch as demographic data andusage of lateral thinking were used to record the data. The collected data were tabulated and analyzed using descriptive statistics and chi-square test. P-value < 0.05 was considered to be statistically significant. Results: There was a statistically significant association was found in years of clinical practice concerning gender (P=0.043) and qualification(P<0.001). The frequency of lateral thinking usage was found to be statically significant with gender (P=0.009), years of clinical practice (P=0.008) and qualification (P=0.002). Conclusion: To date, there was only very little research about the usefulness of lateral thinking in dental clinics. The purpose of this paper is to outline the role of lateral thinking to dentistry and this study also provided evidence for the presence of lateral thinking in dentistry. It also paves a pathway for researches to conduct further studies.