Acceptability of Teledentistry by Disabled People

Objectives: Access to dental care represents a real challenge for some communities. In France, the Ministry of Health recommends that every person in a nursing home or facility for disabled people should benefit from an oral consultation upon arrival and every year. Unfortunately, only a few people do benefit of this consultation. To address this public health issue in facilities for disabled people the University Hospital of Montpellier launched in 2014 the e-DENT project. e-DENT takes advantage of teledentistry to provide oral consultation by using an intra-oral camera and a telemedicine system. The study objective was to assess the acceptability of teledentistry by 531 disabled people during 16 months from June 6^th2018 to September 2^nd2019.
Methods: After data collection (medical data, dental history and intra-oral videos) previously trained nurses filled a direct observation form on the acceptability of the person. The form has 2 parts: Behavior (B) and Affect. The affect includes the Positive Affect and the Negative Affect during the protocol. For Behavior 5 items were evaluated: fear of electric toothbrush, biting camera, difficulties in keeping the mouth open, opposing and cooperating. Positive Affect was evaluated through 4 items: attentive, enthusiastic, interested and proud. NA was assessed through 4 items: scared, nervous, agitated and hostile. Every item was rated on a Likert scale (0-4). For analysis purposes a derived variable was added: PA-NA where PA=sum of positive affect values and NA= sum of negative affect values.
Results: For behavior, only 14,87% did “not at all” cooperate and 62,33% did “not at all” bite the camera (Fig1). For mood: 70,62% perceived the protocol as a neutral or positive experience. (Fig 2).
Conclusions: The results are encouraging for the use of teledentistry for regular oral consultations for people with disabilities and also highlight the important role nurses could play in a coordinated provision of care.