Patient Awareness and Acceptance of Periodontal Therapy: A Questionnaire Based Study

A pilot study was conducted to test and develop a questionnaire which covers patients knowledge, level of understanding towards periodontal therapy and also their attitude towards practice of oral hygiene and to assess the reasons for non -compliance of patients towards dental treatment. Materials and method : after due ethical clearance , a total of 100 patients visiting the outpatient department of periodontology, A.J institute of dental sciences, Mangalore were explained about the study and were asked to mark their response typed in scale to the questionnaires prepared priorly. The study was conducted for a period of 3 months .A total of 20 questions were divided into 3 sections to know about patient knowledge about gum diseases , attitude towards dental treatment , practice of oral hygiene measures and to assess the reasons for the non compliance of patients towards dental treatment . The response were recorded on a 5 point Likert scale. The options given were strongly agree(SA), agree(A), neither agree nor disagree, disagree(D) and strongly disagree(SD).. Simple descriptive statistics were applied to describe the study variables Results: Data collected showed that about 61% among the population had knowledge about periodontal diseases and around 70.6 % population had a positive attitude towards periodontal therapy .Almost 59% of participants were aware about the oral hygiene practices but only 14% of themstrongly agreed that it is necessary to visit dentist once in 6 month. On analyzing the reasons for non compliance of patients towards dental treatment ,it was mainly due to cost and pain while undergoing the treatment. Patients visited mainly due to bad breadth, yellowish discolouration of teeth, sensitivity and because of pain. Conclusion: This questionnaire based study showed that we need to create more awareness among population regarding the various types of periodontal diseases ,emphasize on advantages of advanced treatment options and how the treatment helps in preventing further periodontal destruction. To address the non compliance due to cost ,patient’s canaware to avail reduction for various treatment charges with the help of their utility cards .The fear of pain can be diminished by proper counselling and educating the professionals on innovative painless treatment procedures