2014 Volume 28 Issue 3 Pages 296-303
Although dental care has been promoted in recent years, it appears that many elderly people remain untreated. It is common knowledge that dental treatment reduces the intraoral germs and so improves the patientsʼ QOL. As a contribution to improving the promotion of home dental treatment we studied dentistsʼ attitudes to home visit dental treatment. This study is based on a questionnaire survey of the dentists in 283 dental clinics in a city. There were 70 replies, of which one was excluded (24.7% answer rate). 22 dentists performed home visit dental treatment, while 47 did not. The 15 items on the questionnaire were analyzed using the Mann-Whitney U test and the Fisher test to find significant differences between the "doing home visits" group and the "not doing home visit" group. We also used structure equation modeling to check the relation between the variables. There was a meaningful difference between the home treatment group and the non-home treatment group in relation to the following items："attended training in home visit dental treatment in my dental school days", "agree with the need for home visits", "think that home visits encourage patients to visit my clinic". In addition there was an indirect effect of other types of job training in raising awareness of home visit dental treatment. We consider the following necessary for improvement of the home care dental treatment system： co-operation with dental clinics, publication of a manual defining the home-treatment dentistsʼ role, and the creation of a dental home treatment training system.
