•  
  •  
 

Article Type

Article

Abstract

Background: COVID-19 pandemic posed an unparalleled challenge to dental education, impacting dental student clinical education and further exacerbated the dental student occupational stress globally. The students are at a higher risk than any other profession considering the nature of the profession and some of the aerosol generating procedures used in dentistry and the psychological and clinical training consequences have not been quantified enough, particularly in a Middle East academic setting. Objective: To find the prevalence of fear, anxiety and perceived clinical training disruption associated with COVID-19 among dental students and identification of independent predictors of fear of occupational infection using binary logistic regression modeling. Methods: This was an 80 dental students (52.5% females, mean age of 23.3 ± 1.14 years) cross-sectional survey. The 19 items of a structured questionnaire were used and were divided into 5 domains related to infection fear, level of anxiety, knowledge of COVID-19, clinical training and protective behavior. Non-parametric tests were used (Mann-Whitney U, Kruskal-Wallis), a chi-square test was used, Spearman rank correlations and binary logistic regressions were used. The Shapiro-Wilk test was used to determine that all variables were not normally distributed (all p < 0.001). Results: Fear of infecting family members was almost universal (98.8%) and 80.0% feared the lack of clinical skill acquisition. Patient-based training was the most significant negative predictor of occupational infection fear (OR = 0.099, 95% CI: 0.033–0.293; p < 0.001) and anxiety level was the most significant independent predictor (OR = 7.83, 95% CI: 2.70–22.74; p < 0.001). The clinical performance of female students was significantly more affected by COVID (χ2 = 4.76, p = 0.029), with significantly higher anxiety scores (Mann-Whitney U, p = 0.037). The fear of insufficient clinical skills was a strong predictor of perceived clinical performance disruption (OR = 7.00; 95% CI: 2.05–23.91; p = 0.002). Conclusions: the fear and anxiety amongst dental students during Covid-19 pandemic were very high and results were gender specific. This negative correlation between patient-centered training preference and fear of infection suggests that patient-centered training might provide a protective factor from occupational anxiety when it is taught with confidence and skills. There needs to be an integrated pathway to patient care with simulation training programs and a separate pathway for psychological support programs in dental schools.

Keywords

COVID-19, Dental students, Occupational anxiety, Clinical training, Fear of infection, Pandemic, dental education, Logistic regression

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Download

Share

COinS