Food for Thought: Exploring Dental Students' Perceptions of Delivering Dietary Advice to Children and Families

Delivery of dietary advice by dental professionals is an important part of national guidelines, to prevent dental disease and improve general health in children and young people. Anecdotally, dental students feel uneasy delivering dietary advice to children and their parents/carers, which may affect their ability to provide effective advice confidently. This study aimed to explore undergraduate dental students' perceptions of delivering dietary advice to children and parents/carers.

Semi-structured qualitative interviews were held with undergraduate dental students who had experience of providing dietary advice for children and parents. Interviews were steered using a topic guide, and were recorded and transcribed verbatim. Recruitment continued until data saturation was considered to have been achieved. Two researchers undertook thematic analysis on the transcriptions independently, prior to agreeing upon the key themes and subthemes.

Interviews were carried out with 11 students with varied levels of experience in providing dietary advice. Managing the child-parent dyad was a key theme, with students finding it challenging to tailor age-appropriate information to engage both parties, particularly when the child's behaviour became difficult. Students found it challenging to deliver dietary advice to children and parents from diverse cultural backgrounds and were aware that families may struggle to implement the advice that they were delivering due to financial difficulties and complex childcare arrangements. Students felt their learning experience in this area was adversely affected by the pandemic.

This is the first study to explore student perceptions of delivering dietary advice, providing rich data to inform future teaching developments and research.