Abstract
Distance Learning represents an opportunity to provide public health dentists with evidence-based information, as face-to-face approaches are more expensive and time consuming. In Brazils Public Health System, few courses target public health dentists in approximately 1000 Public Specialized Dental Care Centers (CEO).
Aim: to describe a series of distance learning continuing dental education courses targeting public health dentists working in CEO throughout Brazil and to evaluate the satisfaction of dentists who completed it.
Methods: The University developed and offered a series of 6 online courses comprising 60 hours each and addressing the following areas: 1) Oral Medicine; 2) Minor Oral Surgery; 3) Endodontics; 4) Periodontics; 5) Special Care Dentistry; 6) Dental Public Health Services Management. Pre-register took place between May and Sep/15. Courses were available on a Moodle Platform, between Oct and Dec/15 and contents were developed using problem- based learning methodology. This was an evaluation study that did not require Ethics Committee approval. However, participants consent was sought, as they were told that the information contained in the forms could be used for research purposes. Confidentiality of data was assured. Two questionnaires provided information about demographics, access to, use of and satisfaction. In addition, 130 videos were posted as open access on YouTube.
Results: 2147 dentists pre-registered, of which 409 (19%) completed the courses. 383 of those (93.6%) consented to participate. Health Services Management had 515 pre-registrations (24%), and was the most frequently completed 129 (31.5%). Most accomplishers were women (71%), the mean age was 38.5 years (± 9.8), and 214 (55.8%) worked in CEO clinic, 132 (34.4%) in Brazilian South region. 213 accomplishers (52%) completed evaluation forms, with the Moodle platform rated as good or very good by 206 (97.1%). Some 38 (17.8%) participants rated the time to accomplish the courses as short or extremely short. Open videos had 30,119 views “socioeconomic inequalities and health” with 2061 (6.8%) views was the most popular.
Conclusions: Distance learning provided access to continuing education to a large number of professional (409) and reached the target audience (214 CEO professionals). Dropouts were high and more frequent in the more deprived North and Midwest regions of Brazil. The number of open views suggests that the topics were of interest for dental care providers. These initial results lead to improvements, mainly provision of student support and increase in platform access times, in the 2016 Edition of the courses.
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