The effect of education on Iranian dental professionals knowledge and attitude about transmission routes and prevention of AIDS

Abstract

Introduction: Injection is one of the most fast routes in spread of HIV in the word. Currently there are more than 4400 HIV+ Cases in IRAN and 28 HIV+ cases in East Azerbaijan. As preparing device of needles and syringes are common among patients and as one of the routes of HIV transmission is related dentistry practice research about the effect of education on knowledge and attitude of dental professionals for suggesting appreciate interventions is important. Materials & Methods: This research is an interventional assessment and cases of this research are 400 dental proessionals, which are chosen in 2003 and were studied by Questionnaire contains 38 questions about transmission routes, prevention, diagnosis and the kind of deal with patients as pre-test. Then they got some information by infections diease specialists and dentists and after that they were studied with the same Questionnaire as post-test. Data analysis was down with calculation of relative frequency, central tendency and disparity, analysis of variance and T- test by using SPSS 10. Results: This assessment showed that the mean score of knowledge about transmission routes and prevention of HIV/AIDS infection before education was 76% and after education was 79%. After education, the mean of attitude score of dental professionals increased about 11%. Conclusion: Interventional education can improve the knowledge and attitude of dental professionals about HIV prevention.