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Report of the Principal School Dental Officer
for the year 1968.
As was predicted in the last annual report there
was some improvement in the staffing of the
dental services during the year and this is
reflected in the increased number of dental
inspections and work carried out, but it is
difficult to predict how long this desirable situation
will be maintained
The unstable staffing situation of the local
authority school dental service in general is
possibly one of the factors which has given rise
in some quarters to the idea that there may be a
decreasing need for such a service in the future.
Dental treatment is provided for school children
by both the local authority service and the general
dental service. Since 1951 the amount of dental
care provided for children by practitioners in the
general dental service throughout the country has
greatly increased and in 1967 5,000,000 courses
of treatment were provided for children under the
age of fifteen years by this service. In this context
a course of treatment is one which renders
the patient dentally fit and may consist of one or
more visits by a patient to a dental surgeon
following a dental inspection The actual amount
of work carried out by the general dental service
exceeded the total amount of work carried out by
all the local authority dental services during the
same period For this reason the suggestion has
been put forward that the general dental service
is now the priority service and therefore the
local authority school dental service has nothing
further to contribute in its present form This of
course pre-supposes that the general dental
service is at least within sight of being in a
position to provide a priority service for all the
7.500 000 children at present in school
The increasing contribution of dental services
provided both by practitioners in the general
dental service since 1951 and more recently by a
moderate expansion of the local authority school
dental service coincided with a period of decreasing
child population following the bulge . In
fact since 1965 the ratio of school dental officers
to the school population has become slightly
greater and although the ratio is still more favour
able than it was prior to 1962 the service is again
losing ground In fact although the number of
courses of treatment provided by the general
dental service practitioners continues to increase
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the actual number of fillings provided by this
service during the last few years has decreased thus
there has been a reduction in the total number of
fillings provided from 4 000 000 in 1960 to 3,500 000
in 1967, The combination of these factors may
indicate an improved standard of dental health in
patients treated within the general dental service and
the increased number of courses of treatment may be
related to routine recall inspections As a corollary
it may be deduced that not more than about three
million individual children receive dental care within
the general dental service at the present time thus
leaving some 4½ million children to be cared for by
the local authority service.
The school population is now rapidly increasing
and by 1980 allowing also for the raising of the
school-leaving age the number of school children will
probably be over ten million Bearing in mind that the
actual number of fillings completed within the general
dental service is decreasing and that the expansion
of the school dental service has failed to keep pace
with the increased school population it would appear
that it will become increasingly difficult to provide
adequate dental care for the entire child population
during the next ten to twenty years.
This problem is essentially one of manpower
deployment and it will not be greatly affected by either
the proposals of the Green Paper or the implications
of the Todd Report unless these implications or
proposals should result in a reduction in the number
of recruits to the profession. The country and the
profession have repeatedly affirmed the need to
provide priority dental care for school children and if
it is intended that dental care should indeed be
provided it must of necessity be backed by some form
of statutory obligation It seems unlikely that the
profession as a whole would find an obligation to
treat a percentage of children within the general dental
service either practical or even desirable particularly
in rural areas.
For all the above reasons the role of the school
dental service as a treatment service for children is
likely therefore to become increasingly important
during the next ten to twenty years,
The number of dental officers should be increased
and the scope of work widened for it is only be anti
cipating the necessity for the considerable expansion
of this service and by deliberate forward planning now
that the child dental service can continue to maintain