Abstract
ABSTRACT Objective: To know the demand and access to specialized procedures in Oral Health in 10 municipalities in the region of Guanhães, Minas Gerais, Brazil, which do not have a Dental Specialty Center. Methods: Cross-sectional study was conducted with 30 dental surgeons of the Primary Care system. These dentists recorded all the patients who were treated from July to November 2016, and who were shown to be in need of being assigned to specialized procedures in oral health. The descriptive analysis was developed in the software SPSS for Windows version 18.0. The study was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (ruling 1.615.701). Results: 1085 patients assigned for specialized procedures in Oral Health were evaluated. The majority of these patients were women (56.6%), within an age-range from 13-34 years (51.9%). Among the specialties evaluated, 61% of the patients presented the need for endodontic treatment, with the most compromised tooth being the first permanent molar (33.2%). The outcomes were recorded for 435 (40.1%) patients. Among these, 19.8% of the procedures were performed in the health unit itself and in 45.5% extractions were performed. Conclusion: Limited access to specialized Oral Health procedures was verified. To enable the Oral Health National Policy to consider the specificities of such regions, it is suggested that the scope of action of the oral health teams in primary care is expanded, or that less expensive specialized services are created, so that the access to this level of oral health is assured to all referred patients.
Highlights
Health care is a fundamental right of the Brazilian people, guaranteed by the Federal Constitution of 1988, which established the creation of the Brazilian National Health System (SUS), and proposed a care model with universal, egalitarian, full, and decentralized access[1,2]
Profile of Primary Health Care (PHC) dentists Of the 32 professionals who participated in the training workshop, and received the data collection instrument, 02 were excluded because they desisted from participating in the study, and the remainder worked in 27 PHC units distributed throughout the 10 municipalities
The state of Minas Gerais has established the regional implementation of the Dental Specialty Centers (DSC), and this process in municipalities with such a small population demands the articulation of many managers, in addition to the need for counting the costs of transport of these patients, which must fall on the municipalities of origin, the majority of which have low income
Summary
Health care is a fundamental right of the Brazilian people, guaranteed by the Federal Constitution of 1988, which established the creation of the Brazilian National Health System (SUS), and proposed a care model with universal, egalitarian, full (integral), and decentralized access[1,2]. A proposal for overcoming this problem is the constitution of Health Care Networks (HCN) in an interconnected arrangement of devices coordinated by primary health care (as the port of entry into the system). The National Oral Health Policy (NOHP), With the fantasy name of "Smiling Brazil", seeks to rescue the doctrines and principles of SUS for the oral health services, by means of the qualification of care, constitution of networks, and guarantee of integral care, by joining preventive and health promotion actions with the curative actions necessary at the different levels of complexity of the system[5]
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