Are dentistry students and professionals prepared to save lives?

Abstract

The Surgeon Dentist faces, in the daily life of his work, the risk of being faced with emergency events involving general health. The emergency is defined as a situation where there can’t be a delay in care, it has to happen at the right moment. Several factors may contribute or trigger a cardiorespiratory arrest: accidents and complications of local anesthetic, extremely anxious patients, patients with heart disease and / or hypertension, allergic reactions, among others. These problems can be significantly reduced or controlled with the implementation of a detailed patient history. Although emergency situations are not very common, they can occur in the dental clinic in an unpredictable way, not following the rules or defined standards. There are cases where it is necessary to use cardiopulmonary resuscitation maneuvers, and the dental surgeon, as a health professional, must be prepared to recognize and establish measures of emergency care or basic life support, in the occurrence of such situations. Given the importance of the topic, this study aims to investigate the level of instruction and capacitation of graduation and pos-graduation students of the State University of the West of Paraná (Unioeste) in relation to medical emergencies in a dentist’s office, aiming to verify if the dentistry professionals and students are prepared for an event, to conduct with efficiency cardiopulmonary resuscitation maneuvers, minimizing potential problems and inconveniences to the patients, as well as inform and educate the population about the legal support to dentists for the execution of these techniques.