Assessment of oral health knowledge, literacy, and attitude among schoolteachers towards oral health - A cross-sectional study

BACKGROUND: To accomplish the purpose of health education and health promotion programs, schools are the most effective place for delivering health information to children. The main purpose of our research was to inform, gather evidence and contribute to developing knowledge regarding the OHL, knowledge, and attitude among school teachers towards oral health in Najran region of Saudi Arabia. METHODS: A questionnaire-based cross-sectional study was conducted in Najran region of Saudi Arabia for 6 months. A stratified cluster random sampling of 252 teachers was taken to represent all the teachers of Najran region of Saudi Arabia. The questionnaire contains 2 parts, sociodemographic part that include age, gender, education, teaching level, and income of the participants. The second part contains 25 items that assess the OHL (HelD-14 questions), knowledge (6 questions), and attitude (5 questions) of the participants. SPSS software version 26 was used to enter and analyze the data (IBM SPSS, Chicago, IL, USA software version 26.0). Multiple Logistic regression was applied to check the relationship between OHL and the associated factors. The Chi-square test was applied to evaluate knowledge of study participants. The level of significance was set up at p < 0.05. RESULTS: A total of 252 school teachers with a Mean age of school teachers 32.25 ± 8.46 participated in the study. The multiple logistic regression model shows the association between age, education, and OHL level of school teachers. After adjustment for sociodemographic factors age (OR = 0.219, 95% CI: 0.058–0.834), education (OR = 9.053, 95% CI: 1.135–72,023) were significantly associated with OHL of school teachers. Female participants showed better performance with respect to all the knowledge questions, a significantly higher level of knowledge (p-value < 0.05) was reported with all the questions except the second question (dental plaques causes). 94.8% of teachers agreed that children’s teeth should be checked by a dentist on a regular basis, while 96.8% agreed that dental health education should be included in the primary school curriculum and that all teachers should receive dental health education training. CONCLUSION: Overall, school teachers have high oral health literacy, adequate knowledge, and a positive attitude toward oral health. The female teachers had more knowledge about dentistry than their male counterparts.