Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
First International Turkish Japanese Dental Congress , Ankara, Türkiye, 24 - 26 Haziran 2021, ss.33
Introduction/Purpose: Dental treatments have high risk due to close relation with the patient and exposure to infectious material including body fluids such as saliva and blood. Also rotatory devices produce large amounts of aerosols while working with water and fluids in mouth. Therefore, current knowledge and practices of dentists on infection control and precautions are of primary importance for the protection of both themselves and their patients' health. During and after the COVID-19 pandemic the world is going through, new regulations and protocols so infectious diseases knowledge became significant in dentistry.
The objective of this study was to investigate the knowledge, attitudes and behavior of Turkish dentists regarding infection control and the effect of changes experienced with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and to compare them with the studies before the epidemic.
Method: The cross-section, descriptive survey study was prepared and conducted in Marmara University Faculty of Dentistry, Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, with the approval of the local ethics committee on 19.05.2020. The survey form consists of thirty questions with two parts. The first part has questions about demographic data (age, gender, specialty, the number of patients cared daily, the working environment, etc.), and second part aimed to evaluate dentists’ awareness and attitudes on infection control (exposure to contact, precautions taken, information on vaccination, sterilization and disinfection reliability etc.). The questionnaire was delivered to the members of the Turkish Dental Association via e-mail and via WhatsApp groups with the purposeful sampling technique. Statistical analysis was performed using descriptive and multivariate analyzes with the data obtained from dentists (n = 238) who agreed to participate in the study.
Findings:The gender of participants was 53.4% (n = 127) female and 46.6% (n = 111) were male. The half of participants (n=119) were graduated from faculties in Istanbul and 53.4% (n = 127) of them attended to no specialty training. Most of the (96%) dentists expressed themselves at high risk group for infectious diseases. A majority of participants (69.3%) took medical history about infectious diseases before starting the procedure and hepatitis B (87.3%) , hepatitis C (62.6%) and HIV (46.6%) were included to questions. While 37,8% (n=90) of dentists indicated that they had contact with infected blood and body fluids in the last 1 year, 27.3% of these dentists did not take any precautions after contact. Most (95%, n=226) of the dentists had at least one dose of Hepatitis B vaccine, it was expressed that only 61.3% (n = 146) had 3 doses of their vaccines. Participants were also checked their Anti-HBs titer after vaccination. There were similarities between the answers about protective equipment used during dental treatments of the infected patient and daily protective equipment usage after the COVID-19 pandemic. Nearly all respondents prefer separate containers for hazardous wastes.
Conclusion: The results of the study showed that the knowledge about infection control became higher than the previous studies. It was observed that dentists have conscious awareness about the cross-infection and personal protective equipment usage to prevent infection transmission. Keywords: Dentists’ awareness, infection control, dental treatment.