Abstract
Education should consider the social consensus that changes according to the times and the social environment, and it is also necessary to consider the technically useful subjects. We collected and reported the 4-year course curriculum of dental hygiene when Korean dental hygiene education has continued over 50 years. Each 4-year course curriculum was collected by searching each university website, or requested by email. The curriculum of 23 among 27 schools was collected. According to the classification of dental hygiene in the dental hygienist national examination classification or the Korean society of dental hygiene science, the subjects of the course were divided into clinical dental hygiene, clinical dental treatment support, basic dental hygiene, social and educational dental hygiene, and collected 23 curriculum courses. The average major curriculum was 104.9 credits and the average number of subjects in major courses was 34.3. The average subjects' number of clinical dental hygienic courses was 33.9 (37.5% of the total major credits), clinical dental treatment support was 30.6 (30.2% of the total major credits), basic dental hygiene was 21.8 (20.8% of the total major credits), and social and educational dental hygiene courses was 13.6 (13.0% of total major credits). Integrated subjects' name in clinical dental hygiene was used in all schools of the survey, such as clinical dental hygiene education (and practice), comprehensive dental hygiene education, and integrated dental hygiene. There were 13 schools (56.5%) that use the integrated name in clinical dental treatment support, such as clinical dentistry. There were 14 schools (60.9%) to open dental clinic management, and 22 schools (95.7%) to open national health insurance claims. The basic dental hygiene curriculum maintained the title of each subject and social and educational dental hygiene education was established in most schools, such as community dental health, oral health statistics, and oral health education. Other subjects were English conversation in dental clinic (8 schools) education, clinical dental treatment support, basic science in dental hygiene, social and educational dental hygiene. We knew the clinical dental hygiene and clinical dental treatment support were changing into the integrated subjects, and most schools run dental hygiene research.