Effectiveness of a Dental Students Stress Management Program

The dental education stress effects and sources were explored thoroughly in the literature, but the effectiveness of stress management programs received less attention. This study introduced a new stress management program, named Dental Education Stress Management (DESM) program. It showed its effectiveness in a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest-follow-up-control group design. The new program was based on the principle of psychoeducation and consisted of three 90-min sessions, to teach dental students how to better deal with their stress symptoms and to reduce their general stress level. Two instruments were used to assess the level of stress of the dental students, namely the Dental Environment Stress questionnaire (DES), and the Psychological Stress Measure (PSM-9). Results show that the DESM program has the desired effect of decreasing the stress levels of its participants, and these effects lasted for at least two weeks. Because of several methodological limitations of the study more research is needed to draw more generalizable conclusions.