Opinions of a group of dentists on "Ethics Code of Turkish Dental Association"

Ethics Code of Turkish Dental Association (TDA) was prepared in 2012 and updated in 2015 and 2018. These rules are aimed at expressing and declaring the professional values of dentists on the one hand and guiding ethical behavior in the practice of the profession on the other. The aim of the qualitative research carried out within the framework of the thesis study is to determine to what extent the rules of professional ethics are recognized and adopted in the field. In this context, face-to-face interviews were conducted with 18 dentists with different professional background and different professional perspectives, using semi-structured questions regarding ethics and professional ethics in general and Ethics Code of TDA in particular. Then the collected data were evaluated with thematic content analysis. Three contexts, 10 main themes and 96 themes were created by evaluating the informations and opinions contained in the answers from the participants. The first context, dentists' perception of ethics and professional ethics, 44 themes under four main themes; the second context, the scope of dental ethics, 27 themes under four main themes; the third context, Ethics Code of TDA, includes 25 themes under two main themes. The research shows that, there is not education-based knowledge and conceptual clarity regarding ethics, ethical problems encountered in professional life cannot be fully distinguished from legal-administrative-social-economic problems and there is a difficulty to cope with them, the ethics code of TDA is not sufficiently recognized and needs to be revised to be more effective on practice. As a result, there is a need and expectation of different professional ethics trainings for the dentistry community and also activities that will introduce the Ethics Code of TDA and increase its reflection in practice. It is hoped that the thesis will contribute to the activities on professional ethics carried out by Turkish Dental Association to supply this need and expectation.