Anxiety, fear, awareness and economic influence amongst Indian dentists during the COVID-19 outbreak

ABSTRACT

Dental practitioners are at risk due to direct contact with possibly infected patients as front-line health care professionals during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Therefore, it is of interest to measure the anxiety, fear, awareness and economic effect of the epidemic on Indian dentists at work .This study was conducted utilizing an online survey questionnaire and Google forms from August 22nd to August 23rd, 2021. A total of 485 doctors took part in the survey. The questionnaire included open-ended, closed-ended, and Likert five-point scale items to measure anxiety, awareness, and the financial impact of COVID-19 on dentists. The Mann-Whitney test was used for two groups. The Kruskal–Wallis test was used as a post-hoc test for multigroup comparisons. The average age of the participants was 36.5 ± 9.2 years, with the majority (75.21%) being just graduate dentists. More than 80.1% of interviewees expressed concern about contracting COVID-19. Younger dentists and females have higher levels of anxiety than older dentists. The level of awareness and practice of COVID-19 precautions and infection-control measures among these dentists (94.1%) was found to be high. This is due to age, qualification, and designation (except GP vs. Specialist). Data shows that about 75 percent of practitioners said their income had decreased by roughly 50 percent, independent of demographic characteristics. Data also shows that Indian dentists had a high degree of knowledge and awareness during the COVID-19 epidemic despite fear and anxiety. © 2022 International Journal of Health Sciences.All rights reserved.