The following concepts are frequently covered in the community health section on national boards.
- Public health preventive treatment modalities include promotion, primary prevention, secondary prevention, and tertiary prevention.
- Dental care delivery needs to consider labor force planning and dental care utilization.
- Program planning stages involve assessment, diagnosis, planning, implementation and evaluation.
- Target population characteristics include specific target population's similarities, age-specific competencies, cultural diversity, and barriers to dental care such as: language, financial status, education level, fear, transportation, attitude, knowledge, conflicts, values, denial, and trust.
- Dental health education is most effective when utilizing goals, objectives, the health belief model, motivation, and behavior modification to improve oral health.
- Teaching strategies include lecture, discussion, presentation, interaction activities, self-study, inquiry, simulation, and demonstration.
- Learning theories are based on learning domains (psychomotor, cognitive, and affective) and learning levels (knowledge, application, and problem solving).
- When designing a school program, Monday and Friday are the most common days for absenteeism.
- Oral epidemiology is the study of the amount, distribution, occurrence and control of oral disease in groups.
- Dental indexes are standardized methods used to describe the status of an individual or group with respect to an oral condition. Various indexes include plaque, calculus, oral debris, gingival and periodontal conditions, fluorosis, caries, gingival bleeding, and malocclusion.
- Research studies utilize different approaches to sampling the population. The most common are: simple random, stratified, systemic, and convenience.
- Research hypotheses are stated as a positive or null hypothesis. The null hypothesis is stated in negative terms such as "no significant difference" between variables.
- Research design -- two types of research designs are descriptive and experimental. Experimental research utilizes placebos and control groups.
- Research methods utilized include descriptive, epidemiological, experimental, historical, retroactive (ex post facto), prospective, and cross sectional.
- Statistics, biostatistics, and data analysis are numerical ways to describe group data.
Please see Chapter 17 for more valuable information on study suggestions.
