Hygienists In Clinics Research Articles

주성분 분석을 활용한 우리나라 치과위생사 인력의 수급 지수 제안

An imbalance in Korea between the supply and demand for auxiliary dental personnel has led to a growing shortage of dental hygienists in clinics. Despite the annual graduation of approximately 5,000 dental hygienists, the number of registered dental hygienists stands at 83,817 as of 2019, and the number of active practitioners account for only half of this total. This study aimed to address issues related to the supply and demand of dental hygienists and develop a regional dental hygienist supply-and-demand index. The research data included the number of dental clinics, graduates from dental hygiene departments, and job openings for dental hygienists on employment websites. Unsupervised machine learning-based principal component analysis, a statistical technique that synthesizes the essence of features from correlated factors, was used for data analysis. The results of developing a dental hygienist supply-and-demand index using principal component analysis revealed a low correlation of the index with the number of graduates from dental hygiene departments, and the highest correlation with the number of dental clinics. The data used and delivered in this study are expected to support the accumulation of knowledge for and the future development of a more accurate index.

Patient and public involvement prior to trial initiation: lessons learnt for rapid partnership in the COVID-19 era

Plain English summaryPatient and Public Involvement (PPI) describes the active involvement of patients and the public in the research process. Through PPI, patients and members of the public are increasingly involved in the design and conduct of clinical trials. PPI has been shown to improve the quality and relevance of research.During the COVID-19 pandemic, clinical trials have been playing a vital role in helping us find ways to prevent and treat the infection and improve our understanding of the virus. It is important that patients and the public are actively involved in deciding how COVID-19 research is carried out. Unfortunately, Research Ethics Committees in the UK have seen far less PPI for COVID-19 research studies compared with research before the pandemic. A key reason for this is that research is being designed much faster than normal and researchers may feel they do not have time to properly involve patients and the public.In this paper, we share our experiences of PPI for a COVID-19 clinical trial. We show that it is possible to rapidly involve patients and the public in COVID-19 clinical trials. We also explain how the design of the clinical trial was changed in response to feedback from public contributors. Lastly, we discuss the wider learning from this process which might be useful for researchers planning PPI activities for COVID-19 clinical trials in the future.Background:Clinical trials are playing a critical role in the global public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the increasing recognition of the value of PPI in clinical trials, just 22% of the COVID-19 research proposals reviewed by Research Ethics Committees in the UK at the start of the pandemic reported PPI. There is a perception that PPI might result in delays in delivering research and therefore delays in obtaining important results. In this paper, we report our experience of rapid PPI for a COVID-19 clinical trial.Methods:RAPID-19 is a COVID-19 clinical trial which was planned to be submitted for fast-track ethics review in the United Kingdom. During the development of the trial protocol, the PPI Panel at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Clinical Trials Unit was involved in the design of the study. The meeting with the PPI Panel lasted just over 1 h and was conducted by teleconference.Results:Although we only had a short period of time to explore the study with the PPI Panel, we were able to gain valuable insight into how the trial would be perceived by potential trial participants. Substantive changes were made to the trial to improve the acceptability of the research without compromising the study timelines. Having access to public contributors with relevant lived experience is an important resource for a Clinical Trials Unit and is critical for rapid PPI. The move to remote working due to lockdown required virtual discussions which helped to overcome some of the barriers to organising face-to-face meetings at short notice.Conclusions:PPI for clinical trials can be conducted in a time-efficient manner within the pressured environment of a pandemic. Involving PPI contributors at an early stage in protocol development maximised the opportunity to shape and influence the trial as well as limited potential delays which could occur if changes to the protocol had to be made at a later stage.

Use of dental hygienists and returns to scale in child dental care in Norway

The purpose of this study was to investigate, in the provision of dental care for children, technically and economically efficient combinations of dentists and dental hygienists and to study returns to scale by analyzing production functions. Data from 137 dental health clinics were analyzed. Output was registered as the number of 3-18-yr-old children to whom the clinic delivered complete dental care. Resource input was registered as hours spent by dentists, dental hygienists and dental assistants to deliver care to the children. The average clinic that employed dental hygienists used one hygienist hour per three dentist hours for child dental care. It would save dentist time, but not costs, to extent the use of hygienists. Increased use of dental hygienists might be economically efficient if the work distribution between the personnel groups were changed, for example, by delegating more examinations and preventive care to hygienists. There were technical opportunities for further substitution of dental hygienists for dentists both by introducing dental hygienists in the clinics that only used dentists in child dental care and by extending use of hygienists in clinics that already employed hygienists. This study found no productivity gain from centralizing treatment of children in large dental clinics.