Dental students’ awareness, preparedness and barriers towards managing tobacco-using patients
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objectives: To evaluate dental students’ perceived awareness, preparedness and barriers towards managing tobacco-using patients in Hong Kong. \nMethods: A validated fifty-two-item closed-ended questionnaire was administered to dental students who were in their clinical years in 2017 during classes. The questionnaire consisted of five sections: demographic data, views and confidence towards practicing tobacco-cessation counseling (TCC), clinical practices when managing tobacco-using patients, attitudes toward dental professional’s role in tobacco cessation and perceived barriers during counseling. \nResults: All 206 invited students had participated in this study. Most (93%) agreed that dentists should deliver tobacco cessation counseling and 99% of the students agreed that intervention should be done before dental implant placement. 85% of students felt confident in explaining the negative impacts of tobacco use on oral health. However, only around a quarter (27%) of students were well-prepared to help patients in tobacco cessation. The majority (96%) agreed that they would advise patients to quit tobacco, and most (85%) had attempted assisting patients to quit smoking, but only less than a half (43%) had succeeded in reducing cigarettes consumption of their patients. While 60% of students agreed Nicotine Replacement Therapy (NRT) was helpful for patients to quit tobacco use, only 28% understood its mechanism of action and merely 16% were knowledgeable enough to introduce NRT to their patients. 81% students felt their patients lacked the motivation to quit smoking, and 62% of students felt they did not have sufficient skills at this stage of their training. \nConclusions: Most students had positive attitudes towards dental professional’s role to promote tobacco cessation. However, only a minority of students were well-prepared to manage tobacco-using patients. The main barriers were found to be patients’ apathy, students’ incompetency and inadequate familiarity with NRT. Greater emphasis should be given in teaching of TCC techniques to improve the confidence of dental students when managing tobacco-using patients.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".