Dental Students’ Awareness and Perception of Family Dentistry Specialty: Exploring the Rationale for Its Integration into the Undergraduate Curriculum

In recent decades, there has been a paradigm shift in the approach to medical and dental education, placing greater emphasis on training undergraduate students in community-based primary care settings. Notably, in Europe and America, the general medical council’s reports in 1993 and 2002 respectively recommended that a substantial portion of undergraduate training be conducted in general practice. This reflects the evolving healthcare landscape and promotes exposure to diverse healthcare environments such as hospitals, general practices, and community medical services. However, undergraduate training in the general dental practice (family dentistry) is virtually non-existent in Nigeria. This study therefore, set out to assess dental students’ awareness and perception of the family dentistry specialty. A cross-sectional study was conducted at the Faculty of Dentistry, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. All (30) final year dental students were recruited for the study. The participants consisted of consenting final-year dental students aged 21 years and above. Data on sociodemographics, knowledge, and perception of the scope of family dentistry were obtained using a structured self-administered questionnaire. Descriptive statistics were used for data analysis with a level of significance at p ≤ 0.05. The Result revealed that participants were predominantly aged 21 to 30 years, with a mean age of 25 ± 2 years. Majority (63.3%) were males. Less than a quarter (23.4%) had good knowledge of scope of family dentistry with 76.6% scoring less than 4.0 (the cut off score for good knowledge using Likert scale). Approximately half of the subjects (51%) expressed the belief that family dentistry should be integrated into their training. However, only 10% indicated a desire to pursue family dentistry after completing their undergraduate degree. Statistical analysis revealed no significant relationship between knowledge of the specialty and the desire to choose it (p = 0.34). This shows that there is poor perception and knowledge of the family dentistry specialty among dental students in Ibadan.