Evaluación de adherencia a protocolos de bioseguridad en las clínicas odontológicas de la Universidad Santo Tomás seccional Bucaramanga

Abstract

Introduction. Given the risk that can occur during dental care processes, strict compliance with biosafety protocols is necessary. Aim. To evaluate the adherence of biosafety protocols applied by dental students of a private university in northeastern Colombia within the clinics from the sixth to the tenth semester during 2023. Materials and methods: Cross-sectional analytical study in a population of 354 Dentistry students from the Santo Tomás University who are taking clinics valid for the year 2023-2, applied a validated questionnaire to which sociodemographic questions were added to characterize the participants, filled out in Google Forms. Measures of absolute frequency and percentage are presented to describe the qualitative data, measures of central tendency and dispersion describe the quantitative data. The bivariate analysis showed that the questionnaire score was a dependent variable; the Kruskall Wallis test was applied to establish the statistical association. Values less than 0.05 were of statistical significance. The study was approved by the research committee of the dental school. The information was analyzed in STATA. Results: A total of 135 students took part in the study. The female sex predominated (71.9%), socioeconomic stratum IV (48.9%). The median of the total score was 12 points, with the practices domain having the highest score, that is, the lowest adherence (median of five IQR 2-6) and the knowledge domain having the lowest median, that is, the highest adherence (median of two IQR 0-6) A better overall score of adherence to the biosafety protocol was associated with age and female sex (p<0.005). Conclusions. Good adherence to biosafety protocols is evident in dental students at the Universidad Santo Tomás section of Bucaramanga, with the domains of knowledge and attitudes being better than the domain of practices.