2022 Volume 38 Issue 1 Pages 43-51
Abstract In recent years, contents related to disaster dentistry have been described in the model core curriculum for dental education in Japan and have appeared in questions for national examinations, and some of them have been taught in undergraduate education in dental schools in Japan. However, there are still few reports on the curriculum contents and the effects of disaster dentistry that dental students learn in undergraduate education. Therefore, we conducted a questionnaire survey on disaster dentistry for dental trainees (FY2019, FY2020 and FY2021) at Hiroshima University Hospital.
As a result, many dental trainees recognized “personal identification” and “oral care” as the roles of dental professionals during disasters, independent of their awareness that they learned “disaster dentistry” when they were undergraduate dental students. In addition, less than 30% of the respondents answered “I don’t know” about the words in the model core curriculum and the laws related to disaster response or personal identification. These results suggest that they learned some contents related to disaster dentistry during their undergraduate years. On the other hand, few dental trainees knew about the existence of the university hospital business continuity plan (BCP) and what BCP was. In advanced clinical training after graduation, it is necessary to learn the contents of disaster dentistry from a bird’s-eye view, interprofessional collaboration, knowledge on specific responses during disasters, and actual actions based on the knowledge acquired in the undergraduate education.
