Factors Affecting Preventive Dental Treatment of Adolescents in Korea

Abstract

<jats:p>We conducted a multilevel analysis to identify factors affecting adolescents’ preventive dental treatment experience in South Korea. We sampled 72,435 students who participated in the 9th Korea Youth Risk Behavior Web-based Survey. The individual-level variables were divided into demographic factors, socioeconomic factors, oral health behavioral factors, and oral symptom experience factors. The regional-level variables included oral health resources, rate of students receiving oral health education at school by region, social deprivation index, and the number of private educational institutions. A higher rate of receiving oral health education in school by region was associated with increased fluoride application (1.04 times, p = 0.003). However, the number of private educational institutes per 1000 people was negatively associated with fluoride application experienced by students (0.64 times, p = 0.039). Students underwent more scaling when there were more dentists per 10,000 individuals (1.14 times, p = 0.008) and less scaling in areas with a higher social deprivation index (0.88 times, p = 0.024). To increase the access to preventive care for oral diseases among adolescents, a preventive system should be established in schools, and a primary dental care system should be established through the cooperation of the government, private dental clinics, and schools.</jats:p>

Geo-Mapping of the Spatial Accessibility to Public Oral Health Facilities among Schoolchildren in Selangor, Malaysia

“…The study markedly found that the SDS teams had a substantially lower travel burden for primary and secondary schoolchildren in urban areas, indicating better accessibility to primary oral health services than their rural counterparts. Study findings also supported the idea that the SDS programme could be expanded to private schools in urban districts as these areas offer more oral healthcare facilities and the mobile dental team has a lower travel burden [33][34][35]. However, more detailed data is required to support the readiness of the SDS programme to expand to private schools.…”