An exploratory analysis of child dental health and use of dental care services in Northern Ireland.

This study will link data from the 2001 Census, the General Registrar’s Office and the Central Service Agency relating to NHS dental service use to explore measures of oral health status and variations in service use among children aged 10. It will compare measures of oral health based on decayed, missing and filled teeth (DMFT) with those based on the state of first permanent molar teeth in children using CSA data. It will describe differences by social class in dental health and in use of dental services; it will explain variations in service use within the context of a constrained utility maximising model of behaviour. Health and service use will be related to parental socio-economic and demographic characteristics, as well as access to dental services and area characteristics.

For this study dental health will be defined using two measures: DMFT and the state of first permanent molars possessed by the child at age 10. These measures will be derived from the cumulative service use by children in the years preceding 2006/07. The relationships between dental health/service use and the range of explanatory variables will be estimated using multivariate analyses of data from the CSA linked to that from the Census, GRO and area based characteristics. Children not registered with a dentist will have dental health predicted using the estimated coefficients from the regression analyses of those where such data exists and their profile of socio-economic and demographic characteristics taken from the Census and GRO.

Publications and Outputs:

Other research being undertaken by the research team took precedence and time constraints then meant that they were unable to write up any findings in academic publications.