Abstract
Little is known about the extent to which dentists have implemented COVID-19 infection control guidelines and the factors influencing this process in daily practice. This national online survey assessed the implementation of enhanced infection control guidelines in daily practice, and explored dentist related factors influencing their application, more specifically dentist infection status and their perceived risk of cross-infection in the dental setting. The survey was validated, pretested and carried out in 2020. A total of 1436 dentists participated, of whom 9.1% presumably had COVID-19 infection experience. At least 75% of dentists complied with the core part of the recommended protective measures protocol. For each patient treated during the pandemic, an additional cost of 10–30 EUR (86.7%) and an extra time of 10–30 min (70.7%) was estimated. A stepwise binary logistic regression analysis revealed that dentists assumed to have experienced COVID-19 reported a higher self-perceived risk of virus acquisition (β = 2.090; p = 0.011), lower concern of getting infected (β = 0.576; p = 0.027), and lower confidence in being able to prevent disease transmission in the dental setting (β = 0.535; p = 0.022). Some parts of the protective measures were more difficult to apply than others; however, there was no indication of increased disease acquisition in the dental setting.
Highlights
More than a year has passed since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, with an increasing number of people worldwide being infected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus and its variants identified in, e.g., the United Kingdom, South Africa, Brazil, United States of America, and India [1,2,3]
Even though the infection control measures were only implemented to a certain extent, they seem to have been sufficient to maintain the rate of dentists experiencing COVID-19 infection comparable to that of the general population and to that of other healthcare workers in Belgium [20]
The proportion of Belgian dentists who reported at least one major or two minor symptoms COVID-19 related symptoms (8.0%) was comparable to that reported by Wolf et al [21] in Switzerland and Liechtenstein (10.3%), but was lower than the observations made by Persoon et al [22] in the Netherlands for dentists reporting at least one COVID-19 symptom (19.2%) and by Estrich et al [14] in USA for dentists reporting symptoms (17.8%)
Summary
In spite of introducing protective measures and vaccination programs for the population, new emerging variants of the virus mean that countries are still at risk, even when, momentarily, they seem to have the infection under control.
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