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165
DENTAL TREATMENT
(Maternity and Child Welfare) .
F. ELSTON, L.D.S., R.C.S.Eng., the Chief Dental Officer,
reports: —
In any resume of the Maternity and Child Welfare Dental
Service reference must be made to the fact that only administratively is it separate from that of the schools and that, clinically,
it is part and parcel of the Borough's whole dental service. Consequently it is, ipso facto, subject to the same problem which
besets the school dental service, namely, inadequate facilities. In
previous Reports it has been made abundantly clear that, whilst
the N.H.S. scheme of free dental service provides adequately for
the expectant and nursing mother, there remains a clamant need
for a similar service specialising in preventive and restorative
dentistry for the young child. Our normal reaction to such a
situation would have been to fill this void by encouraging mothers,
by all means at our disposal, to make periodic visits to the dental
clinic an integral part of the child's pre-school life. As previously
reported, with considerable regret, such action has been precluded by reason of the fact that it would decimate the present
available facilities to such an extent that neither the infant nor
the school child would be left with an adequate dental service.
Of necessity, our policy has been one of concentrating on the
young school child together with an emphasis on the dissemination of preventive knowledge to parents as well as children. It
has been noted with satisfaction that this knowledge is indeed
being applied to the younger siblings of school children whose
parents have been given suitable health education and preventive
advice. Such a circumscribed policy, dictated by circumstances
beyond our control, is inescapable when one considers that at
only four clinics are M. & C.W. facilities available and our
dental surgeons operating at secondary school surgeries are in
no position to assist in ameliorating the situation. Comparative
statistics must, therefore, be viewed accordingly.
From the appended statistical analysis it can be seen that the
treatment pattern in 1971 followed that of preceding years. With
due consideration to over-booked sessions and an ever-increasing
waiting list of school dental service patients, we gave what