Pursuing Public Health Dentistry as a Career: Motivations and Factors Influencing the Dental Students

Abstract

Introduction: A person’s career is the process and actions he or she takes to achieve lifetime goals through his or her occupation.Choosing a career is one of the most important decisions one will ever make. Dentistry yields an extensive scope of career and employment chances as a general professional and specialist Objectives: This study sought the career choices of public health dentistry by dental students and association between sociodemographic profiles of study population with reasons of choosing public health dentistry as a career. Methods: Cross sectional study conducted atInstitute of Dentistry, Liaquat University of Medical and Health Sciences Jamshoro from 1st March 2021 to 31st May 2021.Sample of 197 undergraduate students were approached using convenience sampling. Data was collected through preformed, validated paper-based survey questionnaire. Association between various socio-demographic variables and career interests of participants was sought by Chi-square tests at 0.05 (2-tailed) level of significance. Results: Around 69.54% of participants belonged to age group of 21-23 years with females accounting for 59.39%. Around 40% participants chose dentistry to please people. A large majority around 62.42% respondents stated that they find public health dentistry an interesting field. Age (p=0.08) and gender (p=0.06) of the individuals were not statistically connected with future career choice in dentistry. Conclusion: Reasons for choosing public health dentistry as a career among the surveyed dental students are mostly related to socio-demographic factors.