Evaluate the Effectiveness of Repeated Oral Health Education Programme on Oral Health Knowledge and Hygiene of Visually Impaired Individuals

EVALUATE THE EFFECTIVENESS OF REPEATED ORAL HEALTH EDUCATION PROGRAMME ON ORAL HEALTH KNOWLEDGE AND HYGIENE OF VISUALLY IMPAIRED INDIVIDUALS

        SYNOPSIS

3/21/2012

INTRODUCTION
In dentistry, a key health promotion tool used is oral hygiene instruction. Oral hygiene instruction is especially important for prevention and treatment of oral conditions in children as it provides basis for good oral health throughout life. An oral hygiene instruction normally includes the use of visual aids such as disclosing tablets and models. Unfortunately, none of these measures are beneficial to visually impaired children who depend much more on feeling and hearing to learn. This led to the thinking about what techniques are used when educating visually impaired persons about their oral care as vision is the primary sense for learning and consequently the sense on which most educational programmes are based. The main factor of differentiation between normal patients and blind ones is the difficulty in removing plaque. [1]
Blindness is the condition of lacking visual perception due to physiological or neurological factors. Various scales have been developed to describe the extent of vision loss and define blindness.[2]
Blindness is defined by the World Health Organization as vision in a person’s best eye of less than 20/500 or a visual field of less than 10 degrees. [3]
Visually impaired children daily face challenges for bearing their everyday skills. Maintenance of proper oral hygiene is one among them. The visually impaired people are at a greater risk to develop caries, since they are unable to see the early signs of caries such as discoloration which indicates the disease process. The difficulty in removing bacterial plaque being the main factor for development of caries, continual motivation to the correct oral hygiene procedures is fundamental in order to keep a good oral hygiene in blind patients. [4]
“Death is no more than passing from one room into...