Development Strategies in Medical Education

Introduction:Increasing dental student self-assessment leads to better service delivery and reduced patient referrals. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the self-assessment of dental students in treating systemic disease patients.
Method:In this descriptive-cross-sectional study,71final year dental students of Yazd in the academic year 2011-2012, completed questionnaire containing 15questions to assess student self-confidence in treating systemic patients in terms of routine dental procedures and simple surgeries. The collected data were entered into SPSS23 software,the results were presented in descriptive statistics,data were analyzed by Chi-Square test.
Results:32male and 39female students with an average age of24.17±2.28participated in this study.23students were in 11th and 48were in12th semester.Their mean average was16.31±0.94. No statistically significant association was observed between the mean self-assessment score of students and gender (P>0.05).Except for patients with type2 diabetes and HbA1c-8.5, no statistically significant association was observed between the frequency of self-assessment in dental considerations in systemic patients and semester of study(P>0.05) for the other diseases defined in the questionnaire. Except for patients with stable angina under treatment (P=0.035)and patients with a history of epilepsy who are under treatment and have not had a seizure in the last two years(P=0.013),no statistically significant association was observed between the frequency of self-assessment in dental considerations in systemic patients and mean average(P>0.05)for the other diseases defined in the questionnaire.
Conclusion:The level of self-assessment of students in performing dental procedures in diseases such as hepatitis, thalassemia, type two diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and platelet count below9000 was low.As a result,students prefer to refer patients with these systemic problems.