Oral Care and Probiotics

Objectives: To elaborate and determine the efficiency of an ethical method, based on a thought experiment in ethics, on hygiene rules compliance for dental healthcare team members.

 

Study Design: A prospective study that assesses hygiene compliance in dental practice before and after a thought experiment in ethics, using two questionnaires.

 

Participants: 130 clinician students in dentistry of Strasbourg University Hospital (HUS), France.

 

Results: The results emphasize a better implementation of hygiene rules after the thought experiment in ethics, when comparing the relative frequencies of completed hygiene items. A Wilcoxon signed rank test shows significant differences between the first questionnaire and the second one after the thought experiment in ethics (p<0.001).

 

Conclusions: This ethical method provides efficiency on hygiene rules compliance, which makes it beneficial to implement. The benefits are for patients and for dental healthcare team members, since an improvement of infection control leads to a decrease of occupational hazards in dentistry. However, far from being an absolute unit method, this thought experiment in ethics appears to be an original, supplementary and complementary method.