Awareness of Dental Students About Infection Control Practices

Objectives: The aim of this study was to evaluate awareness of dental students of different level regarding infection control practices.
Methods: A questionnaire-based cross-sectional survey was conducted among 59, 3^rd,4^th - and 5^th -year dental students at the Faculty of Dentistry, Taif University, KSA. The self-administered questionnaire comprised of 25 close-ended items with yes, no and don’t know options to measure the awareness about infection control practices and infectious nature of diseases encountered in dental practice. Data were analyzed with a Kruskal-Wallis ANOVA and Man-Whitney U test. p ≤ 0.05 was considered significant.
Results: The response rate was 88.9% (53 out of 59 potential respondents). Overall, 92.45% of students responded that they are familiar with hand washing technique. 25% of third year dental students believed that dental clinics are more prone for infectious diseases than that of other medical fields, where as fourth and fifth year students, the agree response was 70% and 75% respectively (p=0.002). 73.58% of overall students responded for willingness to treat patient with infectious disease among which fourth year student agreement was 50% (p=0.03). Overall, 90.5% students agree that they should receive vaccination for hepatitis B, but, 24.5% of them have been vaccinated against hepatitis B. only 12.5% of fifth year student feel it is ok to postpone emergency dental treatment if patient is suffering from highly contagious disease (p=0.03). There was no statistical significance in awareness of infectious nature of various diseases including HIV, hepatitis A, B and C, tuberculosis, SARS and herpes infection. Dental caries and periodontal disease were responded as non infectious by students of all levels
Conclusions: The finding of the study highlight that the awareness of infection control practices by deferent levels of dental students is average and there is a necessity of continued infection control education in order to improve the same.