Fissure sealant therapy, a challenge in education of dental hygiene students

Fissure sealant therapy is one of the dental hygienists’ tasks in some countries and has been inserted in their curriculum during recent curriculum revision in Iran. Fissure sealant therapy has been selected as national program in oral health promotion and insurances cover it. Therefore, their education in this field must be continuously supervised. This study evaluates the dental hygiene students’ knowledge and attitude towards fissure sealant therapy, dental caries, diagnosis and refer the cases who need restorative (operative) treatment to the dentist. This was a cross-sectional, descriptive and analytic study. All of nineteen dental hygiene students of Rafsanjan School of Dentistry participated in this study. They filled out a questionnaire. Data was analyzed in the form of descriptive and analytic statistics by spearman correlation. Almost all of the students diagnosed occlusal caries’ signs correctly and knew about no need to fissure sealant therapy on deep caries. Eleven students correctly answered to necessity of referring the patients to the dentist. There was a positive correlation between correct caries diagnosis and contraindication of applying fissure sealant. More than 40% of the students had no correct attitudes towards their referral role in dental care system. In contrast, they have an efficient knowledge about caries diagnosis and correct tooth selection for fissure sealant therapy. As a matter of fact, dental hygienist education program must contain more active theoretical and practical modules to improve their attitude toward referring to other levels of dental care system.