Improving Oral Hygiene Skills among Hemato-Oncology Department Children: Interventional Program

Objectives: The aim of this interventional program was to educate children at the hemato-oncology department for improving oral hygiene skills.
Methods: Children (and parents) from the hemato-oncology department were educated and instructed in order to improve their dental oral hygiene skills. Instructions, demonstration and practice of tooth brushing techniques as well as inter-proximal cleaning were in three separate sessions. In each session, brushing skills were evaluated using the Ashkenazi index in order to assess the improvement in oral hygiene skills over time. Four assessments were performed and recorded for each participant: prior to the initial explanation, immediately following the explanation, three weeks and 6 weeks following the first visit.

Results: Overall, 52 children were enrolled to the program. The first tooth brushing performance skill evaluation revealed low scores of 10.44 out of a total of 40 that were significantly raised following the instruction session to 33.02 (p<0.001). This improvement was kept also for the follow-up visits at 3 weeks (35.09±6.3) and 6 weeks (36.34±8.3). When dividing the results to the “reach” and “stay” components it can be observed that at baseline both scores were very low, however, the “stay” component was mostly deficient with an average initial score of 2.17±3 out of 20. Nevertheless, following the given instructions, a significant raise was accomplished in both “reach” and “stay” components up to a level of 18.44 out of 20 for reach” and 17.9 out of 20 for “stay” at the last visit (p<0.01).
Conclusions: Individual supervised tooth-brushing education, including a methodological tooth-brushing technique, appears to be very effective. Educating medically compromised high risk patients such as hospitalized children might be a good way to improve oral health and prevent future disease in this population.