ABSTRACT
Introduction: A traumatic dental injury actually represents an acute transmission of energy to the tooth and its supporting structures, which results in fracture and/or displacement and/or separation or crushing of the supporting tissues. The widening gap in access to quality emergency dental healthcare in our hospitals within the context of knowledge and skillset inequalities remains a menace to patient care. Treatment of traumatized patients requires immediate initial emergency treatment, followed by the restoration of the damaged oral structures. Yet, only a little attention has been paid to the actual frontline personnel who are the dental interns and clinical dental students in public hospitals.
Objectives: To assess the knowledge and experience towards management of traumatic dental injuries among clinical dental students in Benin city.
Method: This descriptive cross-sectional study utilized self-administered questionnaire containing both closed and open-ended questions to garner data from dental interns and clinical dental students. The data of interest were on their knowledge and experience in the management of dental trauma. Pre-tested self-administered questionnaires were used for data collection. Data coding and cleaning was done and the data was entered and analyzed with IBM SPSS version 26.0 software. Uni-variate analysis was done to assess the distribution of variables. Bivariate analysis was used to determine the association between demographic data as well as the knowledge and experience in the management of traumatic dental injury to anterior teeth. Descriptive statistics was used to detect outliers and missing data. Frequency distributions and cross tabulations was computed for categorical variables. The level of significance was set at p <
0.05.
Results: A total of 95 respondents participated in this study. Seventy-seven (81.1%) had a poor overall knowledge of management, although most of the participants had knowledge of some of the steps involved in emergency management of dental trauma. The association between respondents’ level of education and their knowledge of management of dental trauma was found to be statistically significant (P=.0.002). Respondents at higher level in their dental training were found to have better overall knowledge of dental trauma management while those at lower level had poor knowledge. More than half of the respondents 64 (67.4%) were observed to have a poor overall experience in management of dental trauma to anterior teeth compared to a smaller proportion of the respondents 31 (32.6%) who had good experience in management.
Conclusion: The knowledge and level of experience in the management of dental trauma among clinical dental students and interns was poor. The level of study and clinical exposure were factors that contribute to knowledge and level of experience in the management of dental trauma Keywords: knowledge, management, dental trauma.
