ABSTRACT
Purpose: The aim of this study was to determine descriptive characteristics of dental students, to investigate their professional expectations, career decision criteria, and related factors; to examine how (if any) seniority in school affects these. Subjects and methods: During the period of 2018-2019, all 1-5 grade students (n = 754) of Hacettepe University Dental School were invited to participate and those who accepted had filled under observation a standard questionnaire form of 35 questions (83.4%). In the analysis of the data, descriptive statistics, chi-square, Student's t-test and ANOVA and Odds ratio methods were used. Results: In this cross-sectional study, 66% of the group were female, age range was 18-30 (mean±SD= 21.2 ± 1.7). The most common reasons for choosing dentistry were "financial benefits", "job security" and "professional status". "Undertake specialist training" (80.2%) was the most common short-term expectation after graduation; two most common long-term expectations were "having a private clinic" (57.9%) and "completing specialization training" (56.0%). The most important factors affecting the post-graduation working plans were work-life balance and economic stability. Conclusion: It is recommended to provide adequate counseling and guidance to students about potential career paths to maximize a balanced and widely accessible oral health service delivery across the country with more motivated dentists. Qualitative research may improve our understanding of how dental education can be improved to fulfill students' expectations from school, and to motivate dental students towards general practitioning in the future.
ABSTRACT
OBJECTIVE: Although the sale of electronic (e)-cigarettes and "I Quit Ordinary Smoking" (IQOS) is completely prohibited in Turkey, it is observed that tobacco products are sold on the internet. MATERIAL AND METHODS: This descriptive study was conducted between February 11 and 15, 2019, using three search engines (Google, Yandex, and Yaani) in Turkey. All combinations obtained with the keywords (wrapping tobacco, cigarette, hookah, pigtail, cigar, pipe, e-cigarette, snuff, and IQOS) and appendices (sale, price, and shipping) were searched; 2,160 links were scanned. The contents obtained from 130 different URLs were evaluated. RESULTS: The most sold product was e-cigarettes (41.2%) and the least sold one was cigarettes (2.5%). Websites contained 500 phone numbers (79%), live support (32.8%), e-mail addresses (67.2%), and postal addresses (42.9%) for communication. Approximately half of the sites had routing tabs to social media. These websites offered some payment facilities (credit card/debit card, 64.7%; money order/electronic funds transfer (EFT), 37.8%; payment at the door, 54.6%) and contained encouraging texts (61.3%) and misinformation (42.9%). More number of websites selling e-cigarettes or IQOS had the campaign sales (89.3% vs 63.6%; p=0.001), possibility of shipping (98.7% vs 86.4%; p<0.05), and false information about the harmlessness of the tobacco products (61.3% vs 11.4%; p<0.001) compared with websites selling other products. CONCLUSION: This is the first study to show that the tobacco industry is breaking the laws, and the websites which sell tobacco products are easily accessible to the internet users. It is necessary to strengthen the electronic commerce monitoring and control in Turkey.
