Awareness and attitudes regarding oral care intervention program based on community care for older adults at home: focusing on the grounded theory

Objectives: This study is based on a visiting oral health care intervention program in the community care. This qualitative study was conducted through in-depth interviews to identify awareness and attitudes regarding intervention program among older adults. Methods: The research team visited the homes of the target older adults and conducted in-depth interviews for approximately an hour using a semi-structured questionnaire. The collected voice recordings were transcribed using Clova Note, and AI program by Naver. Using the ‘Word Cloud Generator 3.7’ program, words of high importance and interest from interview answers were extracted, visualized, and analyzed. Results: Participating older adults acknowledged that their quality of life related to oral health could be improved by increasing the level of oral health awareness and oral health knowledge through the intervention program. In addition, the older adults indicated that their oral hygiene management ability improved compared to before the intervention through expert oral hygiene management and oral health education. Further, as the level of oral health knowledge increased, so too did satisfaction with the intervention program increase. Conclusions: The intervention program for visiting oral health care showed a positive effect on the awareness and attitude of older adults. Thus, it is suggested that education for continuous competency enhancement of dental hygienists and multidisciplinary education for the improvement of general health and quality of life of older adults should be promoted.