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Perception of Pedodontists Regarding Dental Care in Children with Special Needs in India: A Cross-sectional Study
Shalan Kaul1, Ajay Kumar2, Palak Mahajan3
1Department of Pedodontics and Preventive Dentistry, Indira Gandhi Govt Dental College and Hospital, Jammu, Jammu and Kashmir, India.
Background:
Pedodontists have a vital role in maintaining the overall health of children with special health care needs (CSHCN) by providing basic, preventive, comprehensive, and restorative dental care to such children. In doing so, Pedodontists face many challenges due to several environmental and nonenvironmental barriers.
Aim:
The aim is to gain insight into the perceptions of Pedodontists in India on providing oral health care to CSHCN and the challenges they encounter in doing so.
Materials And Methods:
The self-administered questionnaire, with 20 questions, was made available through online resources to 250 randomly selected Pedodontists from all over India. The questionnaire evaluated the Pedodontists' practices, attitudes, level of knowledge/awareness, and the barriers they encounter during the management of CSHCN.
Results:
Regarding attitude, even though 81.7% of Pedodontists were confident in managing CSHCN, 88.7% were in favor of developing super specialization in special care dentistry and skill upgradation at the postgraduation level. With regard to knowledge/awareness, about 98.6% of Pedodontists were aware of the dental home, and 45.1% were aware of Indian laws for disabled people. Even though inadequately motivated parents (39.4%) and lack of access to dentists providing care (22.5%) were stated as the greatest barriers to receiving dental treatment by CSHCN, lack of training was the major problem perceived by the Pedodontists in treating CSHCN.
Conclusion:
The dental curriculum model, both at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels, needs to be revived to equip future dentists to deal with CSHCN. Special care dentistry should be adopted as a super-specialty in pediatric dentistry for treating CSHCN.
Clinical Significance:
This study enlightened us about the difficulties faced by pediatric dentists in providing dental health care to CSHCN and explored customized strategies to address these challenges, thereby improving the quality of dental treatment for such children.
How To Cite This Article:
Kaul S, Kumar A, Mahajan P, et al. Perception of Pedodontists Regarding Dental Care in Children with Special Needs in India: A Cross-sectional Study. Int J Clin Pediatr Dent 2024;17(12):1340-1345.
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