ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION: Safe practice in medicine and dentistry has been a global priority area in which large knowledge gaps are present.Patient safety strategies aim at preventing unintended damage to patients that can be caused by healthcare practitioners. One of the components of patient safety is safe clinical practice. Patient safety efforts will help in ensuring safe dental practice for early detection and limiting non-preventable errors.A valid and reliable instrument is required to assess the knowledge of dental students regarding patient safety. OBJECTIVE: To determine the psychometric properties of a written test to assess safe dental practice in undergraduate dental students. MATERIAL AND METHODS: A test comprising 42 multiple-choice questions of one-best type was administered to final year students (52) of a private dental college. Items were developed according to National Board of Medical Examiners item writing guidelines. The content of the test was determined in consultation with dental experts (either professor or associate professor). These experts had to assess each item on the test for language clarity as A: clear, B: ambiguous and relevance as 1: essential, 2: useful, not necessary, 3: not essential. Ethical approval was taken from the concerned dental college. Statistical analysis was done in SPSS V.25 in which descriptive analysis, item analysis and Cronbach's alpha were measured. RESULT: The test scores had a reliability (calculated by Cronbach's alpha) of 0.722 before and 0.855 after removing 15 items. CONCLUSION: A reliable and valid test was developed which will help to assess the knowledge of dental students regarding safe dental practice. This can guide medical educationist to develop or improve patient safety curriculum to ensure safe dental practice.
Subject(s)
Educational Measurement , Patient Safety , Psychometrics , Humans , Psychometrics/instrumentation , Psychometrics/methods , Patient Safety/standards , Patient Safety/statistics & numerical data , Surveys and Questionnaires , Educational Measurement/methods , Educational Measurement/statistics & numerical data , Educational Measurement/standards , Reproducibility of Results , Students, Dental/statistics & numerical data , Students, Dental/psychology , Education, Dental/methods , Education, Dental/standards , Male , Female , Clinical Competence/statistics & numerical data , Clinical Competence/standardsABSTRACT
OBJECTIVE: To measure impact of oral health in complete denture wearers and its effects on masticatory efficiency with new complete dentures over the period of three months. STUDY DESIGN: Experimental study design. PLACE AND DURATION OF STUDY: Department of Prosthodontics, Bahria University Medical and Dental College, Karachi, Pakistan from September 2019 to December-2019. METHODOLOGY: Oral health impact profile (OHIP) was used to measure the oral health impact; and chewing gum method was used to measure the masticatory efficiency in this study. All participants were old denture wearers having the experience of at least 3 years and requiring new set of complete dentures. A total of 31 patients were asked to chew the gum from the routine site of mastication for 20 seconds. The weight reduction corresponded to the masticatory efficiency. The OHIP-14 score and masticatory efficiency was recorded at baseline and after three months of complete denture treatment. The data was analysed on SPSS version 23. RESULTS: The average values of masticatory efficiency were significantly reduced from median (IQR) value 1.20 (1.20-1.30) to 0.90 (0.70-0.90), respectively (p <0.001). There was a moderate positive correlation for physical pain and disability (0.407 and 0.455) at baseline and strong positive correlation (0.771 and 0.825) after 3 months of complete denture treatment with p-value <0.001 on OHIP-14 scale. CONCLUSION: Statistically significant improvement was observed in both quality of life and masticatory efficiency after 3 months of treatment with conventional complete dentures. Masticatory efficiency was highly correlated with all subscales of OHIP-14 after treatment. Key Words: Complete denture treatment, Masticatory efficiency, Oral health impact profile-14 (OHIP-14).
