Effectiveness of interprofessional oral health program for pediatric nurse practitioner students at Northeastern University, United States

BACKGROUND: Interprofessional education (IPE) is an important part of the landscape of modern education. However, there is a significant deficiency of studies that evaluate IPE in dentistry. The aim of this article is to evaluate the effects of an oral health educational program on the dental knowledge, awareness, attitude, confidence, and behavior of pediatric nurse practitioner (PNP) students and to emphasize the importance of IPE for PNP. METHODS: First-year pediatric nurse practitioners from Northeastern University participated in an IPE oral health education seminal and practical session as a pilot study. Several tests were used to evaluate the effectiveness of the educational program. The post-test assessed the knowledge, awareness, attitude, confidence, and behavior of the students immediately after attending the lecture; again immediately after hands on experience; and finally at a follow-up approximately a month after attending the training module. The training module consists of prevention and anticipatory guidance; caries process and management; trauma and dental emergencies. Differences in score items were evaluated between 4 time points. Friedman’s, Wilcoxon signed-rank and McNemar’s tests were used to analyze the results. RESULTS: Knowledge score was determined based on the number of correct responses to seven questions, while awareness score was based on the median of eight questions. Fifteen confidence, attitude, and behavior questions were used. The total sample size was 16 students with a mean age 33.31 ± 7.52. The majority were females (87.5%). Significant improvement was seen in all subjects’ overall knowledge of oral health topics. The confidence, attitude, and behavior scores were differed by time of test (P < 0.01). It was the highest after post-test and the lowest in pre-test. CONCLUSION: Our study suggests that introducing an Interprofessional education program for pediatric nurse practitioner students can provide them with adequate knowledge, awareness, confidence, and attitude regarding oral health issues. It also can help them in changing behavior, prevention and ongoing dental surveillance.