Health Care for Infection Prevention from Dental Practice of Dental Professional Staffs of the Faculty of Dentistry, Chiang Mai University
No Thumbnail Available
Date
2010-06-24
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Chiang Mai Dental Journal
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to survey health care for infection prevention of the dental staffs in the dental clinics of the Faculty of Dentistry, Chiang Mai University. Questionnaires were distributed to 164 dental staffs including dental assistants, nurses, and dentists. The questions were asked about their health care behavior regarding to the infection control in dental clinics. Data were collected during February to August, 2008. One hundred and fifty two (92.68%) staffs were responded. The results showed that the annual physical examination that the respondents were mostly performed was blood testing (84.2%), while general physical examination was conducted in only 75% of the respondents. About sixty four percents of the respondents reported injuries from needle stick or sharp instruments and most of the accidents (26.3%) occurred during the instrument cleaning procedures. Exposure to the AIDS patients were highest informed (78.3%), followed by hepatitis B (68.4%) and herpes (57.9%). About 20% of the respondents received hepatitis B vaccination and 15.1 % had Tetanus toxoid. Regarding to protective barriers, the respondents mostly used gloves (86.9%) and masks (80.9%), but face shield (32.9%) were lesser used. 30.9% of the respondents usually recapped needle by their hands and that may cause needle stick injury. And when the injuries were happened, only 34.3% of the respondents reported the accidents to their head supervisors. This study concluded that the dental staffs had a high possibility of being infected during their works. The reasons included the chance to contact the high risk patients, activities during works that may cause accidents and inappropriate use of protective barriers. It is recommended that scrupulous practice following guidelines of infection control should be concerned. Keywords: health care personnel, infection prevention
Description
Keywords
Citation
Chiang Mai Dental Journal; Vol.31 No.2 2010; 97-103