Introduction: The number of mentally altered patients a dentist meets in practice is increasing and interaction with them can be very challenging. As a baseline for an interventional study, we want to assess the attitude of dental students and identify areas of improvement in patient communication. This work compares the attitude of dental students towards people suffering from dementia to the attitudes of trained medical caregivers and the general population. Our aim is to use the results to assess the need for training in communicating with mentally altered patients.
Materials and methods: Fourth-year dental students attended two lectures on dementia given by a psychiatrist as part of the geriatric dentistry lecture and were questioned afterwards using the Dementia Attitude Scale. In 2016 and 2017, 73 students at the University of Greifswald were interviewed. The response rate was 84%. Using a factor analysis, the Dementia Attitude Scale's validated questions were interpreted and compared with data from nursing staff from Switzerland and the USA.
Results: The factor analysis of the data showed the same two-factor loadings as the comparative groups, and that dental students' attitude is more comparable to the general population than to medically trained nursing staff.
Conclusion: Given the results, we conclude that the implementation of a communication module can serve in improving the attitude of dental students towards patients with dementia.
Keywords: communication skills; dementia; dental education; psychiatry.
© 2023 The Authors. European Journal of Dental Education published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.