Abstract
The Special Olympics (SO) is an international sports organization that provides opportunities for people with intellectual disabilities to play sports and connect with their communities through sports. The SO also conducts activities aimed at maintaining their health, such as providing health checkups at the time of athletic events. It has been reported that opportunities to receive medical examinations decrease after school graduation for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Even if they are aware of pain or discomfort, it is difficult for them to communicate their symptoms by themselves. To mitigate this problem, the SO includes dental checkups as one of the categories of health examinations. We surveyed the impact of volunteer activities on psychological barriers to persons with intellectual disabilities among dental professionals who volunteered to perform dental checkups at the SO Japan Summer National Games held in Hiroshima in November 2022.
The volunteer participants included 29 dentists (48.1±9.3 years) and 18 paradentals (39.4±10.9 years). The results of the questionnaire showed that the participants’ image of people with intellectual disabilities was more favorable after volunteering, especially in the categories of “friendly,” “cheerful,” “excellent,” “unique,” “familiar,” “poor,” “scary,” “don’t want to get involved with,” and “annoying” (all p＜0.05). In addition, a total of 76.6％ of the respondents answered that their “mental barriers” had “not changed,” “disappeared,” or “decreased.” Additionally, 78.7％ of the respondents answered “strongly agree” or “somewhat agree” in response to the question “Would you be willing to participate again in an event involving people with intellectual disabilities?”. On the other hand, no respondents answered “strongly disagree” or “somewhat disagree.”
There are still many situations where people with intellectual disabilities cannot receive adequate dental care. Therefore, there is an urgent need to modify the environment for them to be able to easily receive dental care. The present study suggests that being involved in activities with the disabled may effectively reduce psychological barriers between people with and without intellectual disabilities. Thus, providing many dental professionals with such opportunities can contribute to normalization of attitudes in dentistry.
