Dental hygiene therapy students' radiation-protection compliance in Nigerian teaching hospitals: a mixed-methods safety-culture analysis of supervision gaps

Radiation-protection compliance among dental hygiene therapy students in Nigerian teaching hospitals remains poorly characterised, and supervision gaps are frequently invoked as an explanation without being specified. Drawing on the DHS Program indicator 'Women's occupation: Agriculture' (id EM_OCCP_W_AGR) across 35 African countries and 140 country-survey observations from 1994 to 2024 (mean 40.584, SD 20.59, range 1.40 in South Africa to 74.44 in Rwanda), the analysis uses this real dataset as a comparative proxy for structural occupational segregation in health-adjacent workforces, since no equivalent multi-country dataset on dental hygiene therapy supervision exists. The paper specifies three supervision mechanisms—allocative, normative and interpretive—that link safety-culture deficits to compliance behaviour, and it proposes a mixed-methods design that would test them. The contribution is a mechanism-based framework that converts 'supervision gaps' from a descriptive label into an analysable construct, with implications for how teaching hospitals structure radiological oversight of students.