Prison Dentistry V/s Hospital Dentistry

Objectives: To find out the oral hygine status and treatment needs of the prisoners of District & Central Jail of Faisalabad. And compare it with oral hygine indices of paramedical and clerical staff employed in Allied Hospital and DHQ Hospital (both gov sector) ,Faisalabad in order to access whether or not free person enjoy a better oral hygine than persons behind the bars.
Methods: Cross sectional study.
A random sample of 197 prisoners and a random sample of 100 workers in hospitals.
Participants underwent a structured interview and a dental examination in accordance with modified WHO oral health assessment Performa (1997)
Inclusion criteria : The prisoner must be behind the bars for at least one year. The staff ( working on scale1 to sacle 16) must have been working in hospital for at least one year.
Results: The prevalance of caries among prisoners was higher 98.5% than staff 92%. Mean DMFT score 6.6 of prisoners was not much different from hospital employees. Among prisoners 2.5% were denture wearers whereas in staff 4% were having dentures. More than 12% of prisoners suffered from pre-malignant conditions like OSF whereas this ratio is 8 % among hospital staff.
Coming towards treatment needs 88.2 % of prisoners and 85 % of hospital workers required restorations. Extraction was needed in 66.7 % of prisoners and 58 % of staff. 42.2% of prisoners required prosthesis whereas 36% of hospital staff also required dentures.
Both jails have the visits of dental surgeons on monthly basis.
Conclusions: Our study ,though, shows extremely poor oral hygine of prisoners and stresses the need to provide proper dental care facilities in the jails but the part of our study concern with free citizens ,which are even employed in government hospitals equipped with fully established dental departments certainly does not indicate the better picture of oral health status .This employs that there is a need for oral health awareness in our society on effective basis.