Mobile Application with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Principal for Parents with Intraoral Injection Anxiety: A Quasi Experimental Study

Parents dental fear and anxiety (DFA) towards intraoral injection treatment for their children will lead to negative child behaviors and also discourage parental consent for the treatment. Considering the need for management of intraoral injection DFA in parents of pediatric patients, a mobile application using cognitive behavioral therapy principal named “Siap ke Dokter Gigi (Ready for the Dentist)” was developed. This study aims to evaluate the potential of this application ability to instantly reduce the level of intraoral injection DFA in parents by investigating the difference in the level of intraoral injection DFA among parents of pediatric patients before and after using the mobile application. The study was conducted using a mobile application that contains questionnaire and involved 34 respondents. The survey comprised 18 Likert-scale and non-parametric tests were done by using Mann Whitney U-test to compare the DFA level score of intraoral injection before and after the use of the application among different groups. Wilcoxon Signed-Rank test was used to measure the difference between the total score before and after using the application from the same respondent. There was significant difference between DFA levels towards intraoral injection with the declining values of DFA levels were 40.5 and 28.97 for before and after using the application, respectively. This study also found no significant difference in the scores before and after using the application between genders, educational statuses, parental injection experience, and child injection experience. This study shows that a mobile application with CBT principles potentially can help reduce the DFA of parents towards intraoral injections.