Longitudinal patterns of provided oral healthcare services to Dutch young patients: An observational study

Riët Hummel; Joost den Boer; Geert van der Heijden; Wil van der Sanden; Josef Bruers

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0299470

Longitudinal patterns of provided oral healthcare services to Dutch young patients: An observational study

PLoS One. 2024 Feb 23;19(2):e0299470. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0299470. eCollection 2024.

Authors

Riët Hummel^{1

2}, Joost den Boer^{1

3}, Geert van der Heijden¹, Wil van der Sanden⁴, Josef Bruers^{1

3}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Oral Public Health (OPH), Academic Centre for Dentistry Amsterdam (ACTA), University of Amsterdam and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
² Zilveren Kruis, Zeist, The Netherlands.
³ KNMT, Royal Dutch Dental Association, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
⁴ Department of Dentistry-Quality and Safety of Oral Healthcare, Radboud University Medical Center, Radboud Institute for Health Sciences, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

Abstract

General dental practitioners (GDPs) differ in the preventive and curative care they provide to their young patients. This may be related to variation in the caries risk of patients, but also to differing opinions among GDPs about 'proper care'. Longitudinal data offers the possibility to make care patterns of GDPs comparable and to reveal possible treatment variation between GDPs. GDPs who participated in this study delivered data on the oral healthcare services (OHS) they provided to young patients during the period 2013-2017. Subsequently, data from patients who received regular OHS for 4 to 5 years were used in the analyses. Based on this, longitudinal preventive and curative care patterns were distinguished. Patients were divided into 3 preventive care patterns: no prevention, occasional prevention, and regular prevention. Furthermore, 3 curative care patterns were distinguished: no curation, curation in 1 year, and curation in several years. These care patterns were then combined. In addition, patients were classified into caries risk categories based on the caries-related treatments they received over a 2-year period: low (no procedures), elevated (1 procedure), and high (2 or more procedures). The caries risk based on the first 2 years and the last 2 years in the dataset were combined into a longitudinal caries risk profile. The most frequent combined care pattern (35.8%) was no curation and occasional or regular prevention. The most common longitudinal caries risk profile was low at beginning and end (45.2%). Dental practices varied considerably in the distribution of curative and preventive care patterns. Thereby, no relationship was shown between curative care patterns and provided preventive care. There was also a large spread in the provided OHS within the various caries risk profiles. These diversities indicated treatment variation between GDPs, which is unwarranted if less or more care is provided than necessary.

Copyright: © 2024 Hummel et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Publication types

Observational Study

MeSH terms

Delivery of Health Care
Dental Caries* / epidemiology
Dental Caries* / prevention & control
Dentists*
Humans
Professional Role

Grants and funding

Software supplier Vertimart supported this study in kind by building the application for data collection into their dental software program Exquise and sending the invitation for participation to their customers. All costs for the data collection in this study have been funded by the Royal Dutch Dental Association (KNMT). The funders had no substantive involvement whatsoever in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.