Oral health indicators in primary health care: the understanding and the information recorded by dentist-surgeons

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to know the understanding of Oral health indicators recommended by the Ministry of Health by dentists in the family health strategy of the state of Ceará in 2008. METHODS: It is a descriptive, cross-sectional study in which it was used a questionnaire to obtain the data concerning the way information on oral health actions performed in Family Health Care Units and other social spaces are registered, as well as investigate their knowledge about oral health indicators. The calculation of the sample of dentist-surgeons adopted an absolute sampling error of 6.8% and a significance level of 5%, resulting in an initial sample of 175 dentists; however, only 159 participated in this study according to the inclusion criteria. For instance, they should have been working in the service in the period from 2001 to 2007. In all, 32 cities participated in the research, distributed in 18 Regional Health Cells selected by drawing lots. The data were processed in the program SPSS version 17.0 and considered statistically significant the inferential analyses with p < 0.05. RESULTS: it was observed that there are differences between the interpretation of the indicators objectives and the data relating to oral health actions recorded by dentist-surgeons from the Family Health Strategy. They also differ from the guidelines of the Ministry of Health. CONCLUSION: The pregnant present some knowledge about oral health that can be improved by means of educational, preventive and healing programs. This group exert big it influences in the family ambit, could act as agents multipliers and avoiding the child's precocious contamination.