Abstract
Background
Poor oral care may lead to systemic disease, and there is evidence that assisted living
(AL) residents lack quality oral care; in AL, poor care may be due to staff knowledge
and attitudes, as well as organizational barriers to providing care.
Objectives
Determine AL staff knowledge and attitudes regarding mouth care and barriers to changing
care.
Design
Self-administered repeated-measures questionnaires completed before and after oral
care training.
Setting and Participants
A total of 2012 direct care staff and administrators from 180 AL communities.
Methods
Nine knowledge questions and 8 attitude and practice intention questions, and open-ended
questions regarding training and obstacles to providing oral care.
Results
Overall, 2012 participants completed pretraining questionnaires, and 1977 completed
posttraining questionnaires. Baseline knowledge was high, but staff were not uniformly
aware of the systemic-oral link whereby mouth care affects pneumonia and diabetes.
Almost all staff reported learning a new technique (96%), including for residents
who resist care (95%). Suggested areas to improve mouth care included having more
hands-on experience. The primary perceived obstacles to care centered around residents
who resist care and a lack of time.
Conclusions and Implications
Based on reports of having benefitted from training, AL staff overwhelmingly noted
that new knowledge was helpful, suggesting the benefit of skills-based training, especially
in dementia care. Mouth care in AL has been sorely understudied, and merits additional
attention.
Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: December 29, 2020
Footnotes
S.Z. is a co-principal in Generativity, LLC, which assists in dissemination of Mouth Care Without a Battle. S.Z. received grants from the National Institutes of Health during the conduct of the study. No other authors had conflicts of interest.
This work was funded by the National Institute of Aging (Grant R01 AG061966). The sponsor had no influence on the design, methods, subject recruitment, data collections, analysis, and preparation of paper.
Identification
Copyright
© 2021 Published by Elsevier Inc. on behalf of AMDA - The Society for Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine.
