• Journal of dental hygiene science
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.59-66
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• 2003

As a basic research material to make more efficient healthcare and health promotion for dental hygienists, this study intends to determine which factors may affect their awareness of occupational diseases. For this sake, this study attempted to investigate into a variety of literatures and data, and applied a questionnaire survey to 160 dental hygienists for about 5 months(from June to October 2003), who were all employed in domestic dental clinics or offices. As a result of analysis, this study can be concluded as follows: (1) The result of analyzing how dental hygienists recognized their occupational diseases showed that 'stiffness in muscle, neck or shoulder due to intensive use of specific physical regions' and 'stress resulting from the attributes of each task' reached the highest awareness(90.6%) of all, which was followed by 'lower eyesight due to detailed or even sophisticated tasks for many hours(65%)' and 'symptoms of ruptured disk due to standing tasks as dental hygienists do for many hours(62.5%).' (2) The result of analyzing how dental hygienists recognize their occupational diseases showed that their awareness averaged 7.28 points out of 14 points, which implies that their awareness of occupational diseases is not very high. Meanwhile, the result of examining how they recognize detrimental or harmful properties of given materials against human body showed that a majority of total respondents(74.4%) regarded given materials as detrimental to human body. (3) The result of examining how dental hygienists recognize their occupational diseases showed that a majority of total respondents(91.9%) identified their own occupational diseases. Many of total respondents(41.9%) pointed out that environmental improvement around workshop in each clinic or office should be foremost prerequisite to health and welfare for dental hygienists. Next, 34.4% of total respondents pointed out the necessity to perform in-house health diagnosis and examination on a regular basis, and 13.1% of total respondents thought it necessary to carry on healthcare education into harmful properties in the aspect of dental materiology, respectively.