Abstract
Since 2007, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare of Japan and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government have carried out measures to promote domiciliary dental care in cooperation with medical care. However, there have been no studies that assess the impact of these measures on domiciliary dental care or medical cooperation. In this study, survey results gathered by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government and the Tokyo Dental Association in 2006 and 2011 were comparatively analyzed. The results showed that fewer dentists practiced domiciliary dental care in 2011 than in 2006 and fewer dentists cooperated with chief physicians compared to 2006. It was revealed that the measures by the national government of Japan and/or the Tokyo Metropolitan Government have not been effective. The most common reason for not practicing domiciliary dental care, which increased in comparison to 2006, was the “lack of requests”. The results suggested that the problem is the lack of communication between patients who need domiciliary dental care and dentists. On the other hand, dentists who have achieved positive results in domiciliary dental care are older and tended to have higher motivation for gathering related information or for attending training sessions. In many cases, domiciliary dental care started when a patient who had previously visited a dental office switched to home-based medical care. The fact that the number of such cases has increased since 2006 and the number of patient home visits by dentists for domiciliary dental care has also increased might indicate the future direction of domiciliary dental care.
