Abstract
The effect of health and preventive counselling, provided by dental hygienist to individuals and patients, depends among other things on their attitudes towards oral health. Projections of attitudes to health or to a disease control constitute the individual’s compliance with relevant recommendations.
This presentation aims to show how a dental hygienist using specific questionnaires or educational and re-educational interviews can assess the degree of compliance, incorrect attitudes in various domains of oral health psychology, the value of preventive behaviour and its outcomes. The assessment of specific individual attitudes towards health allows, in case of preventable diseases, to objectively estimate recommended behavioural changes (e. g. in oral hygiene) rather than merely seeking their clinical outcomes.
The core domains of attitudes towards oral health include oral health beliefs, health locus control, self-regulated and normative behaviours and the attribution of the effect of preventative recommendations. Health locus of control characterizes the attitude of an individual to putative factors influencing his/her own health.
During the initial and maintenance phases of preventive and therapeutic interventions it is possible, based on the assessment of self-regulation or normative behaviours and attributions, to estimate the degree of individual’s compliance and the probability of its long-lasting retention. The knowledge of basics in health psychology applied to attitudes towards oral health and oral diseases control, within the competence of dental hygienists, allows not only to individualize educational techniques but also to reveal appropriate error attitudes of subjects and thus to manage the really problem-oriented oral health counselling.