2020 Volume 40 Issue 4 Pages 499-503
Japan is changing to a super-aging society in which one in three individuals are expected to be elderly in the near future. Consequently, the establishment of an integrated community care system is being promoted, and so dentistry is required to engage in multidisciplinary collaboration to provide appropriate dental care to patients. While there have been recent reports on the efficacy of perioperative oral care at the ward level, these have mostly come from large hospitals with dental departments. Medical-dental partnerships are urgently needed in hospitals that do not have dental departments. Our objective was to promote cooperation between medical and dental hospitals, centered around oral care and dysphagia rehabilitation provided by dentists and dental hygienists. We evaluated the launch of this project between May 2017 and April 2019 and investigated policies to further promote medical-dental cooperation.
We retrospectively examined 180 patients aged 26-101 years （70 men, 110 women, mean age 72.1±15.5 years） who were admitted to hospitals without dental departments. Requests for care were predominantly received from the departments of oncology and internal medicine. The most common primary disease was malignant neoplasm （82 patients, 45.6%）. A total of 666 treatment interventions were provided：oral care was the most common at 265 interventions （39.8%）, followed by 127 conservative dental treatments （19.1%）, and 122 cases of dysphagia rehabilitation （18.3%）. Although there was some variation in the monthly change, the number of interventions was gradually increased during the first year and leveled off in the second year. In spite of many requests from medical departments, we could not collaborate enough as we were short-staffed in the second year.
We collaborated with a hospital that did not have a dental department to provide care to inpatients at that hospital via on-site visits. The interventions primarily consisted of oral care and dysphagia rehabilitation by dentists and dental hygienists, which promoted medical collaboration between a medical hospital and a dental hospital. Care visits to a medical hospital without a dental department appear to have a major impact and will become even more essential in the future.
