Oral Health Among Patients Served by a New Dental School

Objectives: The ECU SoDM was founded to address access to oral health care in the state of North Carolina; the school's clinics distributed across the state are located in areas of need, in part identified as Dental Practice Shortage Areas. The purpose of the present evaluation is to establish population characteristics and oral health indicators of our patient population to date, as compared to NHANES data.
Methods: Data were categorized to be comparable to recently published NHANES findings. To calculate proportions, we used the total patient pool as the denominator. We did not use direct or indirect standardization for comparisons, as our population represents our patient pool whereas NHANES data is designed to represent the total US population. Measures presented include DMFT among all ages and sealant presence among children and adolescents.

Results: Approximately 28,000 patients were eligible for analysis, representing virtually all counties in the state. The male:female ratio is similar to national data for dental care utilization by gender. Examination of DMFT data show that caries experience for American Indians agrees with NHANES data, with that group having more decay and fewer fillings compared to other race/ethnicities. However, in our population non-Hispanic whites do not differ from non-Hispanic blacks or Hispanics in number of decayed teeth, differing from national data. Sealant experience in our population was less overall than that reported in NHANES, 33.6% vs 40.5%, driven by the significant difference in the 9-11 y/o age group (33.7% vs 49.3%; p = 0.0001).
Conclusions: These data allow limited comparisons of patients that seek oral health care within our system to oral health status data for the U.S. Similaries and differences between these regional and national data highlight oral health disparities, which may be used to drive programs and policies, and serve to establish a baseline from which to measure changes in oral health in the populations served by a new dental school.