Assessment of stress load among Polish and English dental students’ divisions in Poland

Introduction
Dental students are extremely stressed-out group of young people.
Objectives: The aim of our study was to evaluate factors inducing most of the stress and identify students who are most susceptible to it.

Material and methods
A survey was carried out during a winter exam session of 2018 for both Polish (PL) and English (ENG)-speaking students at our University. Two questionnaires were used, including dental environmental stress (DES) questionnaire and perceived stress scale (PSS-10), through which, a correlation between students’ questionnaires’ responses from each year and their courses of study were analyzed.

Results
309 students from PL group demonstrated a response rate (rr) of 93%, whereas in ENG group (n = 61), rr was 70%, with total rr of 89%. Adjusting for year of study and age, ENG students had lower scores than PL students in both PSS-10 (by 2.341) and DES (by 0.286). In PL group, PSS-10 scores were highest in second-year students (24.08 ± 6.44), while DES scores peaked within third-year students (1.91 ± 0.46). In ENG group, there were no statistically significant differences in PSS-10 between years, and highest DES scores were noted in fifth-year students (2.16 ± 0.28). Most stressful factor at this University was study conditions, while a group that was most susceptible to stress turned out to be second-year, third-year PL students, and fifth-year ENG students.

Conclusions
The faculty should consider the results of the current study to improve the conditions for studying in order to reduce the already elevated level of stress of dental students.