Knowledge and self-reported practice of primary schools' health care teachers on emergency management of traumatic dental injuries in Karaj in 2020

Dental injuries are very common event in childhood and have the negative impacts on their life. Proper emergency management is depended on the knowledge of non-professionals, such as health care teachers’ who are present at the scene. The aim of this study was to assess the knowledge and self-reported practice of primary school health care teachers on the emergency management of traumatic dental injuries in Karaj in 2020.

In this cross-sectional analytic study, an anonymous online questionnaire containing questions related to demographic information, history of previous exposure to traumatic dental injuries and caregivers' practice in dealing with traumatic dental injuries was placed in health care teachers’ virtual groups. Health care teachers were given one week to complete the questionnaires. Descriptive statistics and linear regression were performed to analyze the data via SPSS software version16.

A total of 189 questionnaires were completed (response rate of 80.77%). The mean score of their knowledge out of 10 achievable scores was 5.63 ± 1.98 and their mean score of practice was 4.48 ± 1.86 out of 7 scores. The results of unadjusted linear regression analysis showed that only the previous information of caregivers had an effect on their level of knowledge (p<0.001) and by adjusting the effect of demographic variables, the results of this test showed that the work experience of health care teachers had an effect on their knowledge score (p=0.009). However, the self-reported practice score of health care teachers was not affected by any of the demographic variables.

This study revealed that insufficient knowledge and self-reported practice exists among primary school teachers on emergency management of traumatic dental injuries.