Knowledge Attitude and Practice Regarding Informed Consent Among Dental Professionals in Chennai

Introduction: Dentistry, being one of the healing professions, has an obligation to society that its members will stick on to high ethical standards of conduct. In India, studies done to assess whether the dental practitioners adhere to ethics in their line of work are very meager.

The consent is integral as it enables in mutual communication to establish a good dentist-patient rapport that enables maintenance of dental patient record which is legal evidence that documents professional care provided to the patient. Informed consent is an essential tool of standard ethical dental practice.

Materials and Method: A cross-sectional survey was conducted among private dental practitioners in Chennai City. A self- administered structured questionnaire consisting of 21 items was used to assess their knowledge, attitude and practice regarding informed consent. The response format was based on a 2-point Likert scale. Descriptive statistics using frequency and percentage, inferential statistics using Pearson’s Chisquare test to check the level of significance and association between variables, Pearson’s correlation were utilized for statistical analysis.

Results: The mean scores for knowledge and attitude were 8.83 ± 1.635 and 3.28 ± 0.734 respectively. Analysis revealed that qualification and years of experience was statistically significant among both dependent variables (p ≤ 0.05). Statistically significant differences were found in the mean knowledge and practice scores among graduate dentists and specialists.

Conclusion: A significant association between the knowledge and practice scores was observed, implying that with an increase in knowledge, there was also an increase in the practices of ethics among study population.