Abstract
Background: Traumatic dental injuries can have a significant impact on the life of a child, since it causes both physiological and physical pain.
Objectives: The current study aimed to evaluate the primary school teachers’ knowledge about emergency management of avulsed teeth in Ahvaz, Iran.
Patients and Methods: The study was conducted in twenty randomly selected primary schools of Ahvaz. The 269 teachers in the schools were selected and asked to fill out the self-report questionnaires for data collection. The questionnaire was inspired from one used by Mori et al. and consisted of the three parts: teacher’s demographic data, their knowledge about importance of emergency management, and emergency method that they used. The data were analyzed using chi-square test.
Results: A total of 269 teachers, 41.6% male and 58.4% female, answered the questionnaire. The results showed that 15.2 % of the teachers had an experience of avulsed tooth at school, all of them knew the importance of emergency management and 36.4% would look for a dentist for treatment of the cases. Only 6.3% reimplanted the tooth themselves. Regarding the storage media, 6.7% would keep the avulsed tooth in milk. There was no significant difference between gender and education level (P > 0.05).
Conclusions: The results of the current study showed that school teachers’ lacked knowledge regarding dental trauma and especially tooth avulsion