Knowledge of School Teachers of Santiago Centro against Dentoalveolar accidents.

Objectives: Determine school teachers’ knowledge about dentoalveolar trauma accidents, in a community of Santiago, Chile.
Methods: This is a quantitative, cross-sectional study. Schools of Santiago Centro, a community in Santiago Chile, were randomly selected. Teachers of all educational levels in every selected school were invited to participate, and were asked to signed an informed consent document. A 17 question survey was applied to teachers to evaluate their knowledge about handling of dentoalveolar trauma accidents. Statistical were perfomed with IBM SPSS v2, and the analysis included Kruskal-Wallis test to assess the knowledge level.
Results: 336 teachers of 13 schools participated in the study. An 85,7% of the teachers indicated that they didn’t know if there was any dental emergencies protocols in their schools; 89% affirmed that they had not received any training even though 39,3% had witnessed a dental accident in one of their students. Regarding knowledge, there were no significant differences by gender (p> 0,05), conversely, there were differences by years of teacher experience (p <0,05) and by type of school dependencies (p <0,05). Teachers scored averaged 8.4 points of 14 possible points.
Conclusions: The lack of information and insufficient knowledge of the teachers surveyed, reflects the need to implement educational programs in schools for the management of dentoalveolar trauma accidents.