Developing Guidelines to Encourage Dental Visits among Regular Oral Care Product Customers

Abstract

To enable pharmacists to appropriately encourage dental visits, we developed guidelines for encouraging dental visits by community pharmacists for continuous purchasers of oral care products. To develop the guidelines, we employed a two-step approach: (1) evaluating the effectiveness of the educational video, and (2) identifying issues in the draft guidelines through survey responses and making improvements accordingly. First, we drafted a preliminary version of the guidelines and created an educational video followed by a web-based training session. To assess the effectiveness of the training program, we conducted surveys before and after every session. The results demonstrated that 98.7% of the participants expressed willingness to use the draft guidelines, 97.3% found the educational video easy to understand, and 98.7% found the training useful. Improvements were identified based on open-ended survey feedback and incorporated into the finalized version of the guidelines. This study demonstrated that evaluating the draft guidelines allowed improvements to make them more practical. These guidelines are expected to help pharmacists encourage dental visits.