(PO-073) An Analysis of Dental Hygiene Ethics Education

Author: Anjum Shah, BSDH, MS, Ed.D – Assistant Professor and Dental Hygiene Graduate Program Director, The Ohio State University College of Dentistry
Submitter: Anjum Shah, BSDH, MS, Ed.D – Assistant Professor and Dental Hygiene Graduate Program Director, The Ohio State University College of

Dental hygienists face ethical issues and dilemmas regularly in practice but are ill-prepared to manage them. The literature on dental hygiene ethics education demonstrates a reduced emphasis on ethics education and a lack of student preparation. Thus, the objective of this study was to examine dental hygiene programs' ethics education curricula using a document analysis methodology to provide information on the ethics education sequence and structure and assess what ethics education is lacking.

Methods: Forty programs were randomly selected from the American Dental Hygienists' Association Entry-Level Dental Hygiene Programs' list with a goal of receiving documents from 20. Programs were requested to share their ethics education syllabi, schedules, and program maps.

Results: Nineteen out of 40 programs participated in the study. There is limited sequence and unorganized structure in dental hygiene ethics education. Ethics education varied in the credit hours, semester offering, content, integration, and frequency and lacked ongoing training. Irrespective of a program degree type (associate or baccalaureate), 89.4% provided only one dedicated course on ethics in the curriculum. For 57.9% of the programs, the ethics course was offered in the final year of the curriculum. Only 25% of programs emphasized continuous ethical case analysis or synthesis.

Conclusion: The status of ethics education in dental hygiene is problematic in terms of its sequence and structure. There appears to be little agreement among programs regarding what ethics education should encompass, when, and how often it should be offered. This study recommends: a model ethics education curriculum that utilizes curriculum design theories to solve issues with the current ethical training sequence and structure in dental hygiene; explicit accreditation guidelines to standardize ethics education; dental hygiene programs to self-assess their ethics education learning outcomes for setting goals and documenting progress; and future empirical research on ethics instruction and its associated impact.