Assess Faculty Knowledge, Skills, and Attitudes About Oral Health

IOH Toolkit
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Chapter 2. Are You Ready?

Assess Faculty Knowledge, Skills, and Attitudes About Oral Health

To help shape faculty development programs that will provide education and training around oral health integration, you’ll need to assess the current knowledge, skills, and attitudes of the faculty at your institution.

IOH designed a Faculty Oral Health Survey informed by the core competencies developed by HRSA as part of its 2014 Integration of Oral Health and Primary Care Practice initiative. You can modify the demographics section of the survey to fit your specific needs. The survey responses should provide a baseline understanding of the current knowledge, skills, and attitudes of the faculty at your institution. Those who plan to engage in institution-level change will want to consider additional ways of gathering data.

Faculty champions. Individuals working toward change at the course-level can use this survey to assess their own readiness for oral health integration.

Program pioneers. Individual faculty or a group of faculty who aim to integrate oral health into their professional program can use this survey as a one-time measure of faculty knowledge, skills, and attitudes.

Systems-wide change agents. An effort to take a similar measure across multiple professional programs will require the work of an interprofessional team. Team members can coordinate the dissemination and collection of a survey institution-wide, enlist faculty champions to encourage a healthy response, and conduct focus groups and one-on-one interviews to gauge faculty attitudes and knowledge regarding oral health.

Response rate. Regardless of the level of change you seek, the success and accuracy of your survey will depend on your ability to achieve a high rate of response. For surveys conducted during educational activities, this is simply a matter of asking participants to answer questions before or after the session. For one-time measures of faculty knowledge conducted on a broader scale, however, you’ll need to make it as easy as possible for busy individuals to access the survey, respond to questions, and return it to you in a timely manner.

IOH at Northeastern University (NEU)

To assess faculty knowledge, skills, and attitudes related to oral health and primary care integration, IOH conducted a research study. The goal was to determine what types of faculty development training would be needed in order to incorporate oral health into all NEU Bouvé College of Health Sciences curricula.

Following Institutional Review Board approval, a web-based survey was distributed to 350 faculty members across nine academic programs (Health Sciences, Nursing, Pharmacy, Physical Therapy, Physician Assistant, Communication Sciences and Disorders, Health Informatics, Public Health, and Applied Psychology) and made available for four weeks from the date of administration.

The core competencies released by HRSA as part of its 2014 Integration of Oral Health and Primary Care Practice initiative informed the development of the survey tool, which was created and distributed through the Qualtrics® system. Faculty members willing to participate were sent a link through which to access the survey. Clicking on the link served to signal their consent.

The survey was paired with a raffle. Participants who wished to enter for the chance to win an iPad mini were asked to provide their names, email addresses, and phone numbers. At the end of the survey, all participants were asked to complete a short demographic questionnaire.

To learn more, see: Dolce MC, Holloman JL. Faculty Readiness for Oral Health Integration into Health Care Professional Education: A Pilot Study. Journal of Allied Health. (in press)