Assessment of physicians' perception of HIV+ patients' oral health

The aim of this study was to design and validate an instrument for establishing perceptions of oral health held by physicians treating people living with HIV/AIDS. In order to design the instrument, four domains were identified that could measure the object of study and a 22-item questionnaire was created. The domains established were: knowledge of oral health; personal experience with oral health care; knowledge of oral health regarding HIV/AIDS; professional medical practices. To validate the instrument 50 physicians specializing in infectious diseases from public hospitals of Buenos Aires city completed the questionnaire using a Likert-type scale with 5 categories. The reliability of the instrument was assessed with the test and retest method at 30 days; internal consistency with Cronbach's alpha coefficient; content validity was determined by expert opinion; construct validity with the extreme groups method (Mann Whitney test, p < 0.05). All participants completed the test and retest questionnaires. Their mean age was 37.7 +/- 0.9 years; 36% were female and 64% male. The average experience in medical practice was 8.7 +/- 0.6 years. The instrument proved to be reliable as shown by the value of r(s) = 0.94 in the test-retest method; a satisfactory intra-item consistency was shown by Cronbach's alpha coefficient value of 0.91. The differences between the results of the groups of physicians in the extreme groups were statistically significant (p < 0.001). It is concluded that the instrument designed to measure the perception of oral health of physicians treating people living with HIV/AIDS is valid. However it would be desirable to enlarge the sample and determine criterion validity by comparison with other instruments.