Investigation of the Conditions of a Pediatric Patient Referral Network in a District Dental Association

Abstract

The Matsubara City Dental Association (Osaka) has established a patient referral network for members for difficult-to-treat children and disabled people. We analyzed how this system became widely known among members of the association and what kind of pediatric patients (under 18 years old) were referred, and obtained the following results.

1.From October 2013 to December 2019, the number of clinics that have used this network reached 14, or 24% of the member clinics of the association in the city.

2.Although the patients mainly complained about pain due to dental caries at the clinic of origin, the clinics seemed to have had difficulties because they were unable to properly treat those patients who were too young, disabled, or had fear due to their past dental treatment.

3.The majority of pediatric patients were younger than 6 years old, and the most common reason for referral was uncooperative children. Occasionally, about 10% of cases were newly classified as having intellectual disability, autism, ADHD, etc.

4.The median time from referral to visit was 5 days, and more than half of the pediatric patients with caries and pain who needed prompt treatment had consulted a pediatric dentist within one week since visiting the previous dentist.

5.There were four urgent cases for whom we used restraints for uncooperative children, but in other cases, in addition to tell-show-do and voice control, control by a hygienist was sufficient, and in some cases, no control was required at all.

The pediatric patient referral network of the district dental association has been promoting pediatric patient referrals and enriching dental care for local pediatric patients.