INCREASING DENTISTS EXPOSURE TO HIV PATIENTS

It is particularly important for those who are HIV+ to have access to oral health care. Aside from ethical considerations and the obvious benefits of dental care, oral manifestations of HIV infection make it quite possible that a dentist may be the first person to become aware of a sign or symptom leading to diagnosis of HIV infection. Oral manifestations may cause discomfort, pain and psychological distress and can often be effectively treated. Freedom from infection is particularly important for immunocompromised people and early clinical intervention may increase longevity for those infected with HIV. The aims of the proposal are to utilize what has been learned in an ongoing research project to design a research intervention strategy ultimately intended to increase dentists' voluntary exposure to HIV+ patients (PHIV+) - the outcome measure. Based Ion screening instrument data, dentists who are not willing to treat PHIV+, but who have one or more positive attitudinal predispositions, e.g., they believe there is an ethical obligation to treat PHIV+, will be randomly assigned to one of two intervention programs or a control group. Both intervention programs, one (Group B) with three components: a videotape, an explicatory follow-up phone call and an educational/clinical exposure to an HIV+ educator, and the second (Group A) consisting solely of the third component, are based primarily on social learning theory. The intervention components will be structured, insofar as possible, to increase their generalizability. Men and women HIV+ educators will be randomly assigned to subjects in each intervention group. Three hypotheses will be evaluated. The first, a null hypothesis, is that Intervention B will not be more effective than Intervention A, which in turn will not be more effective than the control condition. nu exploratory hypotheses are that the HIV+ educator's gender will have no effect and that there will be no statistical interaction effect between it and intervention assignment. A categorical analogue to repeated measures analysis of variance will be used to statistically evaluate the intervention programs.