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Correspondence to Author: Dr. Pooja Rathi 

Department of Pediatric and Preventive Dentistry, VSPM’s Dental College and Research Centre, Nagpur.

Abstract:

Objective To evaluate and compare the oral hygiene status of visual impaired, hearing impaired and normal healthy school going children in the age group of 5-18 years and to assess the impact of customized oral health education module on their oral hygiene status.
Materials and methods A nine month comparative study was conducted among total 300 visual impaired, hearing impaired and normal healthy school going children aged 5–18 years. The study was carried out in three phases. Phase I and phase II were carried out at baseline which included clinical examination and education of children using customized module. Phase III was carried out by taking follow-up visits at the interval of three, six and nine months which included the clinical examination and reinforcement using customized oral health education module. Assessment of oral hygiene status was done using standardized proforma, plaque index (PlI) and simplified oral hygiene index (OHI-S), at baseline, three, six and nine months. All the analyses were performed using SPSS version 20.0 (IBM Corp) software.
Results At baseline the difference of mean PlI and OHIS score for all the three groups was statistically insignificant with p-value of 0.0569 and 0.0304 respectively. In all three groups, the mean PlI and OHI-S showed statistically significant difference across time points with p-value < 0.0001.
Conclusion Oral health education in the form of customized oral health education module with periodic reinforcement is an effective method which improved oral hygiene status in normal healthy, visually impaired and hearing impaired children.

Citation:

Dr. Pooja Rathi,Impact of Customized oral health education module among Visual, Hearing impaired and Normal healthy children in Central India: A Longitudinal study. Journal of Dentistry and Oral Research 2024.