The effectiveness of dental and oral health promotion with audiovisual media on knowledge level and oral hygiene status of deaf children

Deaf children are children with hearing loss. This condition results in gaining limited knowledge, including knowledge about dental and oral health. It causes poor hygiene status so that the prevalence of dental and oral diseases is higher than normal children. Health promotion aims to prevent disease and is proven to increase knowledge. Health promotion requires delivery media to be more attractive and to increase understanding. This study aims to determine the effectiveness of dental and oral health promotion with audiovisual media on the level of knowledge and oral hygiene status of deaf children. This type of research was quasi-experimental with one group pretest-posttest design. A total of 41 deaf children in SLB-B YRTRW Surakarta were selected as samples. Health promotion in this study was completed for three consecutive days using audiovisual media in the form of video and was instructed to brush teeth twice a day. Knowledge and status of oral hygiene were measured before and after health promotion. The questionnaire was implemented to measure knowledge and oral hygiene status measured by the PHP-M plaque index score. The data were analyzed utilizing the Wilcoxon test and paired T-test. From the results of the Wilcoxon test, it was revealed that there was a difference in the mean score of knowledge before (10.39 ± 2.11) and after health promotion (12.73 ± 1.92) with a significance score of 0.000. Paired T-test showed that there is a difference in the mean plaque score before and after being given health promotion with audiovisual media (initial mean 24.95 ± 10.01 and final mean 12.51 ± 7.44), with a significance (p) = 0.000. Based on the study results, it is concluded that the promotion of oral health with audiovisual media is effective in increasing the knowledge and oral hygiene status of deaf children.