Nation's oral health to be assessed

Thousands of people across Australia will take part in dental interviews and free dental examinations as part of a $5.8 million University of Adelaide national oral health study.

To be conducted by the Australian Research Centre for Population Oral Health (ARCPOH) in the University’s School of Dentistry, in partnership with national and State Departments of health and dental services, the study will assess the level of oral diseases in the Australian adult population, and the effectiveness, sustainability and equity of dental service delivery across the country.

The National Study of Adult Oral Health 2016-2018 is being funded under a National Health and Medical Research Council grant. Further support has also been received from the Australian Dental Association and Colgate.

“This study will inform policy-makers and service providers who need to make decisions about the delivery of fair and effective dental services for all Australians over the next decade and more,” said chief investigator Professor Marco Peres (pictured), Professor of Population Oral Health at the University of Adelaide and Director of ARCPOH.

Perils of Place Report identifies hotspots of inequality

A new report by the Grattan Institute has found that hospitalisation rates for diabetes, tooth decay and other conditions that should be treatable or manageable out of hospital, reveal that Australia’s health system is consistently failing some communities.

Perils of place: identifying hotspots of health inequality shows that places such as Frankston and Broadmeadows in Victoria and Mount Isa and Palm Island in Queensland have had potentially preventable hospitalisation rates at least 50% above the state average in every year for a decade.

The report suggests a trial of place-based interventions, developed locally, with the support of Primary Health Networks. If potentially preventable hospitalisations in priority places were reduced to average levels in the two states that were studied, the estimated direct savings could be at least $10-$15 million a year.

Read the report
Listen to the podcast
Source: http://grattan.edu.au/

Improve dental scheme, ADA urges new government

Congratulating the Coalition Government on being re-elected, the Australian Dental Association hopes that the Government will consult on how dental care might be best delivered to disadvantaged Australians.

Since the announcement that the Child Dental Benefits Schedule (CDBS) would be replaced by a public dental care scheme, ADA has campaigned to save the CDBS.

ADA says that the Child and Adult Public Dental Scheme (caPDS) will be under-resourced, lack infrastructure, and will increase public dental waiting lists.

The Association’s Federal President, Dr Rick Olive AM (pictured) said: “Any public dental care scheme … must draw upon the existing and already established dental workforce and infrastructure, the majority of which is based in private practice. … the caPDS’s ambition to provide dental care for a larger population group – almost three times larger than the CDBS – must provide much more funding than has been announced.

“A new term of government provides us all with a new opportunity to work together to devise a better public dental scheme.”