Accidents research Ⅰ for the college students in their Dental Laboratory Technology-major classes

치기공과 실습 중 안전사고 실태 조사 Ⅰ

The purpose of this study was to identify injury characteristics happened in the college dental laboratory technique classes and to provide the empirical accident findings for safety education development for the college dental technology classes. The research data were collected from a self-administered survey distributed to the conveniently selected college students. The study participants were 476 freshmen, sophomore and junior students whose major was the dental laboratory technology of the 4 colleges in 2 metropolitan cities and 2 medium-size cities. All collected survey responses were encoded and analyzed in SPSS 12.0. The findings were as follows. The accidents happened to the college students during the dental laboratory technology classes: 1. The accident rate was the highest in the sophomore and the freshmen, junior in order. 2. The body parts frequently injured were hands, face, eyes, arms, and legs in order. 3. The frequent injury types were cut, burnt, stuck, wound, and suffocated in order. 4. The treatment methods for their accidents were the simple first-aids, no treatment, and the emergency room visits in order. 5. The laboratory training conditions inducing the accidents were significantly frequent under wire-related, and wax-related, iron-related, alcohol-related jobs in order, but not frequent in investing material-related, porcelain-related, resin-related, and agar-related jobs. Polishing was the most accident-prone job explaining 63% of the laboratory accidents and then, model producing, wax patterning, casting, burning, and investing jobs in order. In summary, the college dental laboratory accidents had the certain patterns by the training level and by the material or machine involved in each class. Thus, the planned and organized safety education programs should be produced and investigated for college students before their major laboratory classes.