Dental Hygiene Education about Special Needs Patients - A National Survey

Objectives: to explore (a) the extent to which dental hygiene programs in the US cover the treatment of special needs patients, (b) how they present this material and assess learning outcomes, and (c) which challenges and intended future changes they reported.

Methods: Recruitment emails with a link to a web based survey concerning the treatment of patients with special needs were sent to 240 dental hygiene programs in the US. Thirty emails did not reach their destination, and 102 programs responded (response rate=49%).

Results: While 98% of the programs presented this material in lectures, only 43 programs required their students to gain clinical experiences with special needs patients (42%). Most programs covered the treatment of patients with more prevalent physical / sensory impairments such as hearing impairments (93.1%), psychopathologies (89.2%), and adult onset neurological disorders (89.2%). However, some disabilities such as closed head injuries (44.1%) were addressed less frequently. While outcome assessment was most frequently done in a written exam (97.1%), OSCE (9.8%) and standardized patient experiences (4.9%) were used rather infrequently. The most commonly reported challenge concerning covering this material was curriculum overload. However 29.7% of the respondents indicated that they supported an increase of the clinical experiences for their students.

Conclusions: Recent changes in accreditation standards require graduating dental hygiene students to be competent in assessing the treatment needs of special patients. This study assessed the current curricula concerning treating patients with special needs of dental hygiene programs in the US. Based on these findings, expanding the scope of topics and including more hands on and clinical experiences should be considered.