SINGAPORE - The Singapore Dental Council (SDC) has suspended a dentist after a disciplinary inquiry found him guilty of professional misconduct.

Dr Chua Teck Hum, who practises at My Dentist's Clinique in Bedok, had extracted a patient's tooth, removed a foreign body from the extraction site, and then performed a bone grafting operation. Seven weeks later, he carried out an implant at the same site.

However, X-rays done three and six months afterwards showed that the implant was not properly integrated with the bone.

The SDC's disciplinary committee concluded that this was because Dr Chua had not waited long enough for the bone graft to heal before carrying out the implant. Typically, said the SDC in a press statement on Tuesday (April 1), the normal protocol for the method Dr Chua had chosen to adopt is to wait four months.

The patient eventually went to another dentist for a second opinion, and the implant was removed.

Dr Chua was suspended for three months starting April 1. He was also fined $10,000, censured, made to write a letter saying that he would not do something similar in the future, and ordered to pay the costs of the proceedings against him.