Copyright by the American Dental Hygienists ' Association Ethics Instruction in the Dental Hygiene Curriculum

Purpose. Dental hygiene ethics is an essential component of the dental hygiene curriculum. The accreditation standards for dental hygiene education state that graduates must be competent in applying ethical concepts to the provision and/or support of oral health care services.1 Although the standards for entry into the profession of dental hygiene emphasize the importance of ethical reasoning, there is little published research specific to ethics instruction in dental hygiene programs. The purpose of this study was to assess how ethics is taught in the dental hygiene curriculum. Methods. A 17-item survey was designed and distributed to 261 accredited dental hygiene programs in the United States for a response rate of 56 % (N=147). The survey requested that participants provide information on teaching and evaluation methodologies, didactic and clinical hours of instruction, individuals responsible for providing instruction, and the degree of emphasis placed on ethics and integration of ethical reasoning within the dental hygiene curriculum. Results. Results of the survey reflect that dental hygiene programs devote a mean of 20.2 hours to teaching dental hygiene ethics in the didactic component of the curriculum. With regard to the clinical component of the curriculum, 63 % of respondents indicated that 10 or less hours are devoted to ethics instruction. These results show an increase in didactic hours of instruction from previous studies where the mean hours of instruction ranged from 7 to 11.7 hours.2 Results showed 64 % of respondents offered a separate course in ethics; however, 82 % of programs surveyed indicated that ethics was incorporated into one or more dental hygiene courses with 98 % utilizing dental hygiene faculty t