Community Dental Health in Australia - Part 1

(Photo credit: http://www.ncoss.org.au)

Acceptance of participation in community dental health activities as being a legitimate objective of dental hospitals in Australia has not come swiftly or easily and indeed it is still confined largely to the public dental hospital systems. As the costs of inpatient dental care rose rapidly in the 1960 s and dental hospitals came to be seen as the citadels of dental/medical care, dominating the dental health care scene, so calls for a redirection of development in the dental health services began to be heard. The traditional system components of private dental practice personal public dental health services primarily for maternal and child health and domiciliary oral health service dental nursing, and institutional care were seen as an incomplete and inappropriate response to needs. Substantial expansion of personal and public dental health services via a network of dental centers linked in various ways to private dental practice and to dental hospital systems was advocated. One suggested model was that community dental health services would provide in the local setting the traditional public dental health services, referrals to and additional dental treatment (Oral and maxillofacial surgery) under the supervision of general and specialist dental practitioners, preventive services, and health outreach and counselling.

The dental hospital's role was to be the provision of further dental diagnostic radiography, specialist and inpatient  dental care services and back-up and co-ordination of community health dental activities through a department of community medicine and dental with a community medical officer.a The development of networks of community health services was seen as particularly important in the sprawling raw edges of our capital cities where dental hospitals and private dental practitioners were unevenly distributed, in some decaying inner city areas and in catering for the needs of some disadvantaged groups such as Aboriginals.