A qualitative exploration of patients' perception regarding the comprehensive dental services availed at a primary health center.

Introduction: Comprehensive oral care is a service centered around the patient, and individuals who need it the most often face limited access. Patient perception acts as a guide for enhancing quality, ensuring patients' future intent to utilize the services and facilitating recommendations to others. The present study aimed to assess the patients' perception of comprehensive dental services availed at a Primary Health Center (PHC). Methods: This qualitative study was based on a phenomenological interpretive approach, and judgment sampling method was employed. A validated interview guide, developed from relevant literature was employed in the local language to conduct interviews among adults visiting the PHC, gathering their views regarding the services provided. The interviews were audio recorded on a digital voice recorder, and files were password protected. Content saturation guided the determination of the final number of participants interviewed. After translating and transcribing the interviews, thematic analysis and coding were performed using ATLAS. ti 23 for Windows. Results: A total of 12 participants were included in the study, following data saturation. Among them, there were 8(66.7%) female and 4(33.3%) male participants. Ten overarching main themes were discerned through the assigned codes, including positive views, neutral views, negative views, previous dental clinics visited, previous experience with dental treatment, treatments sought at the center, referrals, source of information about the dental center, subsequent visits and suggestions for improvement. Conclusions: The findings of this study revealed a positive patient perception of the comprehensive dental services offered at the PHC. Through insightful interviews, various strengths, and areas for improvement regarding the center and care provision were identified. These insights provide valuable suggestions that can be applied to elevate the utilization of dental services, ensuring continuous improvement in patient care.

Cost-effectiveness Analysis of Comprehensive Oral Health Care for Severe Early Childhood Caries in Urban Beijing, China.

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the cost-effectiveness of comprehensive oral health care for severe early childhood caries (S-ECC) in urban Beijing, China. METHODS: A randomised cluster sampling method was used to select 187 children aged 3 to 5 years with S-ECC from two kindergartens in urban Beijing. Comprehensive oral health care and questionnaires for the parents/guardians were provided to the test group, while an oral health examination and questionnaires for the parents/guardians were provided to the control group. Data were collected and a Markov model was established for a cost-effectiveness analysis. RESULTS: One year later, 614 RMB yuan and 184 RMB yuan were needed for the control and test group, respectively, to reduce one average decayed tooth. The cost for the test group was continuously lower than for the control group during the 4-year simulation. The cumulative cost for the test group was lower than for the control group when the model was circulated for more than 1.5 years. At this time, the change of decayed teeth was stable in the test group. CONCLUSION: Comprehensive oral health care had extraordinary cost-effectiveness for S-ECC. The optimal time to process S-ECC may be after 1.5 years.

The effects of comprehensive oral health care on caries in orthodonticly treated patients / 实用口腔医学杂志

0.01). The new caries did not occur in the test group. DMF index was higher in the controls than that in the tested subjects(P