Hospitals see double number of dental abscesses
Friday, 30 May 2008 09:09
Could problems in access to dentists be the cause of the rise?
A new study has found that the number of people admitted to hospital with dental abscesses has nearly doubled in the last decade.
Researchers at the University of Bristol suggest that the rise could be due to changes in the provision of dental care in the UK.
They decided to study admittances due to dental abscesses after seeing three complicated cases in a six-month period in 2006.
Hospital admissions for the dental problem were reviewed from the years 1998/99 to 2005/06.
Writing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), the researchers say that the total number of admissions and bed days due to drainage of a dental abscess almost doubled during this time.
They suggest that changes to dentists' pay and their NHS workload, which correlated with a decline in the number of adults in England registered with an NHS dentist from 23 million in 1994 to around 17 million in 2003-4, could be the cause of the rise.
"Changes in service provision over the past ten years could have resulted in reduced provision of routine dental care and access to emergency dental care," the study's authors write.
"These changes might explain the rise in surgical admissions for dental abscess."
They add: "We believe that a doubling in a preventable condition that can have major consequences and even cause death constitutes a major public health problem that requires urgent action.
"We think that access to routine and emergency dental care needs to be peer reviewed."