Oral Health | Clinical and Risk Asessment | Why is the patient here in your practice?

Why is the patient here in your practice?
Session overview
Description
This session outlines the reasons why people might or might not attend the dental practice. It identifies contributing factors and barriers that influence service usage.

Learning objectives
By the end of this session you will be able to:

• list the reasons why patients visit the dentist
• identify the factors affecting dental care attendance
• identify the differences between dental and medical healthcare usage
• outline the current NICE guidelines for patient attendance

Prerequisites
Before commencing this session you should have reviewed:

• concepts of need
• epidemiology of oral diseases
• the different models of health

There can be many barriers to attending for dental care.

A common way of assessing the size of the barriers is to monitor the percentage of a population that has not visited the dentist.

The NICE guidelines for non-symptomatic attendance for dental check ups suggests a period of at least once every 24 months.

This assumes that everybody should attend the dentist on some basis.