Oral Health and Dental Management

Disparity in utilization of government-funded topical fluoridation service by preschool children in Taiwan

12^th World Congress on Dentistry and Oral Health

August 04-05, 2016 Manchester, UK

Lin-Yang Chi and Chang-Hong Lin

National Yang-Ming University, Taiwan
Taipei City Hospital, Taiwan

Posters & Accepted Abstracts: Oral Health Dent Manag

Abstract:

Although the National Health Insurance, which includes most dental treatment and covered more than 99% of the population since 1995, many preschool children in Taiwan still suffer from dental caries, which can be effectively prevented by application of topical fluoride. Taiwan government launched free topical fluoridation programme for preschool children up to five years since 2004. However, only a small part of the elligible preschool children actually used the service in the first 10 years. Partly due to the deliberately under-promotion of the government due to budget constraint, limited access to the service was identified as another reason. The government modified regulations to allow dentists go into kindergartens to make the service more accessible to preschool children. However, there was still dark side of the service- disparity/inequality existed between different levels of urbanizations. The present study used data from a representative sample (one million subjects) of the enrollees of the National Health Insurance from 2004 to 2013. Significant differences were shown between the seven levels of urbanization. The significant increases in the mean annual utilization rates of the topical fluoridation service presented only a part of the story. The standard deviation between the annual utilization rates revealed the ever increasing urban-rural disparity between preschool children. We suggest that the government should provide more accessible channels of the publicly funded services to those disadvantangeous preschool children to serve social justice.

Biography :

Lin-Yang Chi has completed his PhD from Cambridge University, UK. He is an Associate Professor at National Yang-Ming University, and the Director of Education and Research Department of Taipei City Hospital, Taiwan. He has published more than 50 papers in reputed journals and has been serving as an Editorial Board Member of Journal of Dental Sciences and other reputated professional journals.

Email: chily9@gmail.com