Dental Ethics Education in Lebanon: A Cross-Sectional Assessment of Knowledge Among Fresh Graduate Dentists

Introduction: Dental ethics education helps dentists to deal with ethical concerns regarding autonomy, informed consent, confidentiality, and justice in daily practice.Although, dental ethics education and ethical knowledge have been studied among dental students and graduates in several countries, no published data describe ethical knowledge among fresh graduate dentists in Lebanon.This study assessed the level of dental ethics knowledge and its predictors among recently graduated Lebanese dentists.Methods: A cross-sectional survey was conducted among dentists who graduated in 2024-2025 from the three Lebanese dental schools (Lebanese University, Saint-Joseph University of Beirut, and Beirut Arab University).A 14-item multiple-choice questionnaire was developed based on the ethics and professionalresponsibility content of the Integrated National Board Dental Examination (INBDE), with the questions adapted to clinical situations relevant to Lebanon, assessed knowledge of the five core ethical principles (autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, justice, veracity) and key concepts (informed consent, confidentiality, deontology), as well as their clinical application.The questionnaire was distributed electronically using convenience sampling.Descriptive statistics, Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal-Wallis tests, and Fisher's exact test were used for analysis.Results: 87 dentists completed the survey (60.9% female).The median score was 11/14 (interquartile range (IQR) 5); 47.1% scored in the good range, while 28.7% scored below average or poor.Participants performed best on the questions assessing confidentiality and informed consent, with more than 88% answering these items correctly.Lower scores were observed for the deontology question and for several clinical scenarios requiring application of ethical principles, with 50.6% to 57.5% correct.Female dentists scored significantly higher than males (median 12 vs 10; p=0.03).No significant differences were found by university (p=0.145-0.555),year of graduation (p=0.725), or extracurricular ethics training (p=0.379).Conclusions: Fresh graduates from Lebanese dental schools reveal moderate overall ethics knowledge but lower performance on several scenario-based items than on definitional items.This pattern should be interpreted cautiously.Gender was associated with total score in this sample.This finding is preliminary.Previous studies suggest that case-based and problem-based ethics teaching, together with structured postgraduate training, may be valuable; this study did not evaluate teaching methods.