Dental public health is a dental discipline to manage the oral health of people in a country, state, or local administrative division level. It has a lot of significance in general public health as oral health is directly linked to the former. Especially during pandemic days, good oral health is one of the effective ways to safeguard people from pandemic infection.  

Dentist Stanhope Gardens is one of the frontrunners in spreading the message of dental public health. They have some crucial observations, insights, and challenges of dental public health in Australia.  

Dental Health In Australia 

In recent decades, the dental health of the citizens of Australia vastly improved. This is mainly due to access to regular dental care from infancy, government awareness programs, and the availability of fluoridated drinking water across the country.  

Still, some points highlight the grey areas of the general dental health of Australians:  

• Nearly 30 per cent of people avoid or delay dental visits due to the cost.  
• Almost four per cent of people above 15 years have no natural teeth left 
• Nearly 25 per cent of children – aged between 5 to 10 – have untreated dental decay  
  

To improve public dental health, state and territory governments offer public dental services to improve the situation.  

The Importance Of Dental Public Health 

According to Professor Woosung Sohn of the University of Sydney, dental public health is a discipline developed by combining the broad fields of public health and dentistry. Its emphasis is to prevent oral health issues and ensure preventive and restorative treatment services for vulnerable groups.  

Dental public health aims to improve oral health at a population level, focusing on preventing oral health diseases. It usually achieves this through oral health education and fluoride application and providing oral care services to vulnerable sections. Today, it has a wider scope and practice.   

Above all, dental public health focuses on improving the oral care delivery system, the cost-effectiveness of the delivery models, and effective and efficient payment systems to ensure dental services to everyone. This type of complex and wide scope of practice requires advanced knowledge and experience in public health, dental, behavioural, social, education, and political sciences for dental public health experts.  

The Key Challenges Of Population-Level Oral Health Management 

According to Professor Sohn, the key challenges are the following:  

• Since the addition of fluorides – including public water fluoridation, fluoride gel and rinse, and fluoride toothpaste – there wasn’t any such breakthrough in preventive dental care at a population level. 
• Promising preventive measures such as pit and fissure sealants have low uptake at dental practices. It is mainly because the Australian dental care system is designed to incentivise to provide treatment rather than focus on prevention.  
• The prevention of oral diseases demands changes in lifestyle and behaviour, making it a huge challenge to achieve at the population level.  
• The demographics are posing another challenge – including the increasing elderly population, migrants, and refugees. Specific strategic approaches are required to take them into account. 
• The alienation of dentistry from general health for overall disease prevention is a major area in which the dental public health experts should work on to overcome. 

  

Final Thoughts 

It’s a reality that a significant percentage of the population in Australia is out of quality dental care. When oral health is equally important as general health, it demands a more focused work on dental public health to improve the overall health and wellbeing of Australians.