2019 Volume 40 Issue 1 Pages 72-79
In recent years, the need for professional dental treatment for patients with disabilities has increased, and thus the necessity of training dentists to treat them has also increased.
The Special Care Dentistry Division of the Osaka University School of Dentistry has been giving second-year dental students the opportunity to visit a nursing home for persons with disabilities as the first step in studying special care dentistry.
We verified the effect of this educational visit by qualitatively examining the students’ reports after the visit and evaluating their learning and change of perspective of disabled people through the visit.
The students’ learning and perspective of disabled people, derived from the qualitative research of the reports, can be summarized as follows. 1） Emotional changes through the educational visit, 2） Formation of students’ perspective of disabled people, 3） Learning about the oral condition of persons with disabilities, and 4） Awareness of special care dentistry. Many students’ feelings changed from negative to positive through the visits and some of them described how to interact with persons with disabilities and what disabilities are.
These results showed that many students have prejudice due to lack of knowledge about disabilities. However, the students may have learned about various communication methods and the characteristics of persons with disabilities through the education. Furthermore, it is thought that the students could understand the difficulty of daily oral care for persons with disabilities and discovered for themselves how to interact with persons with disabilities and problems such as the necessity of visiting dental treatment.
It is suggested that it is important to give dental students the opportunity to visit nursing homes for persons with disabilities in order to understand such disabilities. It is also suggested that such opportunities motivate students to study special care dentistry and to discover the dental problems of persons with disabilities by themselves.
