[Outside clinical setting experience in a public hospital and oral health promotion].

OBJECTIVE To describe a teaching aid activity aimed at providing experience for promoting collective oral health to graduating dental students. METHODS This experience was based on the evaluation of students' performance as oral health educators as they had, among other duties, to motivate inpatients and their families to practice healthy habits aiming at a comprehensive and more human care of hospitalized patients. RESULTS The results show that oral hygiene was incorporated into hospital routine, evidenced by the differences between baseline and final dental biofilm indices (1.72 and 1.17, respectively). Using the U-Mann-Whitney test, this difference was extremely significant (p<0.001) and reveals that mother-child were highly motivated with respect to oral hygiene. CONCLUSIONS It is concluded that teaching-learning experiences derived from interdisciplinary and interdisciplinary activities have allowed for a better understanding of the health-disease process by dental students. It is also an opportunity for learning about planning and implementing education-prevention activities, which complement these students' technical-professional experience and promotes social sensitivity, which is essential to professional training.