Introduction: Dental treatment for children requires not only technical skills, but also the knowledge and confidence to provide behaviour management to support children of differing ages and stages of development. It is not surprising then that dental students find treating children especially stressful. Paediatric dentistry training is therefore a vital element of the undergraduate dental curriculum.
Materials and methods: Eighty-six fourth-year undergraduate dental students received standard lectures and seminars about behaviour management techniques for children having local anaesthetic. The students were then randomly divided into groups using cluster randomisation. The intervention group received an intervention-based around video clips (VCs) demonstrating behaviour management techniques (BMTs) for children receiving local anaesthetic The intervention and control groups completed self-administered questionnaires to determine their level of confidence in managing local anaesthetic for children.
Results: There was a statistically significant difference in the level of confidence between the groups immediately after the teaching intervention (P=.003) and at 4 months (P=.001) in favour of the video group.
Discussion: Previous studies on the use of video as a teaching aid have reported favourable results in terms of both student attitudes and learning outcomes. The results from this study confirm the benefits of this style of teaching paediatric behaviour skills in the undergraduate dental curriculum, and the benefits were maintained at 4 months.
Conclusion: This study has demonstrated that VCs as an additional teaching aid are an effective method in improving students' confidence for BMTs when delivering local anaesthetic.
Keywords: communication; education; paediatric dentistry; undergraduate dental students.
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