Examining the educational curriculum of undergraduate degree in nursing based on the needs assessment of oral and dental health indicators: the experience of Iranian nursing students

Oral and dental health is one of the components of public health, and improving oral and dental health is one of the most important goals of disease prevention. The integration of oral health in public health care is strongly recommended by the World Health Organization. Nurses can actively participate in the promotion of oral health care. The aim of the research was to assess the need for oral and dental health indicators in the curriculum of nursing students.

In this cross-sectional study, 119 third- and fourth-year nursing students of Shiraz University of Medical Sciences were included in the study. Checklist was used as a tool to evaluate students' level of knowledge about oral and dental health, and Chi-square test was used by spss software to analyze the data.

There was no significant relationship between the level of knowledge and ability of students about oral and dental hygiene with the duration of studying at the university, gender, marital status and grade point average (p>0.05), while there was no significant relationship between the level of knowledge of nursing students in the field of health indicators. There is a significant relationship between mouth and teeth and the need to teach these topics in nursing (p<0.05).

This study shows the weak knowledge and ability of nursing students in the field of oral and dental indicators and the important role of the nurse in the health team, and as a result, the need to include this topic in the curriculum of nursing students and present this topic as part of the internship.