general dental practitioners’ knowledge about the emergency management of dental trauma

introduction: the aim of this descriptive cross-sectional study was to assess the general dental practitioners (gdps)’s knowledge regarding the emergency management of traumatic dental injuries (tdi) in isfahan, iran. methods and materials: in this study a two-part questionnaire consisting of 14 questions was distributed among 241 gdps. part 1 included seven questions focusing on personal and professional information and part 2 asked questions about seven given cases of dental traumas. one score was dedicated to each correct answer; the total score of 0 to 4 was considered as poor knowledge, while scores 5-8, 9-11 and 12-14 were assigned as moderate, good and excellent knowledge, respectively. the data were analyzed using the student’s t-test and one-way anova. spearman’s and pearson’s correlation coefficient were used to determine the associations between the emergency treatment knowledge and dentists’ professional information. results : with regards to the level of gdp’s knowledge, the mean score was 7.61±2.68 suggesting a moderate score; a total of 177 (73.2%) of the dentists showed a moderate level of knowledge. a significant association was found between the frequency of dental trauma cases that were encountered and treated by gdps in their daily practice ( p =0.004, r =0.2). conclusion: the overall knowledge of gdps about the emergency management of tdi in the selected community was moderate.