SRM Journal of Research in Dental Sciences (Jan 2020)

Patient's acuity toward dental students' involvement in their surgical care in a tertiary dental institution

  • Thounaojam Leimaton,
  • Manu Batra,
  • Simarpreet Singh,
  • Vikram Pal Aggarwal,
  • Sakshi Shukla,
  • Parul Mangal

DOI
https://doi.org/10.4103/srmjrds.srmjrds_45_20
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 11, no. 3
pp. 133 – 137

Abstract

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Background: Dental students get the chance to experience real-life situations when they are in contact with patients, from whom they learn and enhance their knowledge. As the dental students' perceived professionalism, respect for patient privacy and confidence were significantly related to patients' acceptance of student participation in their care, these social competencies should be a priority in dental curricula. Aims: The aim was to investigate patients' perception regarding dental students' role in surgical treatment procedures. Settings and Design: A cross-sectional study was conducted on a randomly selected sample of 148 patients at our college in the department of oral surgery waiting room during the month of March 2019. Subjects and Methods: OpenEpi was used to determine sample size based on the average number of patients who attended the oral surgery department every day for 4 weeks in the month that proceeded data collection with the exclusion of weekend days. A self-administered questionnaire consisted of 17 close-ended questions to allow adult participants to answer and the guardians to answer on behalf of their children. The internal consistency of the questionnaire showed good reliability for participants during the pilot study (Cronbach's alpha: 0.86) and acceptable validity with intraclass correlation coefficient having value of 0.79. Statistical Analysis Used: Data were analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics Windows, Version 20.0 for the generation of descriptive and inferential statistics. Results: It was found that 34.46% of the total participants did not want to allow dental student to watch them, whereas most of the participants (65.54%) would allow dental student to watch them while dental examination. A total of 86.49% believed that dental students should specifically obtain patient consent prior to becoming observers. It was observed that both genders preferred the similar gender dental student. Conclusion: The results showed that most of the surveyed patients had a positive perception of dental students as they accepted dental students' participation in their care.

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