Objective: To understand the oral care status of elderly inpatients in various departments, analyze the existing problems, and provide a basis for further improving the oral care practices and promoting the oral health of elderly patients.
Patients and methods: This study intends to investigate the oral care status of patients in a tertiary hospital in Chongqing. This study was divided into two phases, the first phase was designed as a cross-sectional study. Our aim was to explore the implementation status of oral care in each department. The second phase of this study was to explore the correlation between patient oral care and patient outcomes.
Results: We extracted a total of 9,164 cases of elderly discharged patients. Primary care patients were mainly distributed in various general wards, among which orthopedics was the most frequent, accounting for 30.19%. The oral care doctor order rate of the patients with premium care was 80.21%, and the rate of oral care orders of the primary care patients was only 2.10%. The study analysis found that among surgical and intensive care unit (ICU) patients, patients in high-frequency group and low-frequency group were significantly better than that of patients without oral care in terms of overall survival.
Conclusions: The oral care is still insufficient, and the frequency of use is relatively infrequent. This study also found that oral care can improve patient outcomes and reduce the incidence of ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP).