Exploring the gaps in dental care

The cost of living crisis is impacting people in different ways, but for many it is their ability to access dental care. It's important that we listen to the stories of every day Australians.

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to speak for an hour on ABC Radio about the issues that many people are currently facing accessing dental care. Live radio is always interesting, particularly when it involves the opportunity for talkback, because you never know what topics are going to come up. So it was not surprising that the switchboard lit up as callers took the opportunity to talk about the myriad challenges and concerns that they had, including long waiting times for public dental care and the impact of the cost of living crisis on dental affordability.

There were plenty of positive stories, with one caller fondly remembering their dentist from 50 years ago in regional Victoria providing free check-ups for the local children, or another from a man who brought indigenous children from Arnhem land to Melbourne where dentists were again reaching out to provide care.

But there were harrowing stories too, with a caller who was forced to access her superannuation to pay for dental treatment to manage the debilitating consequences of Sjögren' syndrome, or a mother who was navigating a complex system to access specialist care for her adult child with an intellectual disability.

We discussed the links between oral health and systemic health, and the fact that funding dental care should be seen as an investment that will save money in reducing unnecessary GP visits, hospitalisations and inappropriate antibiotic prescribing. Improving access to care and focusing on prevention should be the basis of any new dental funding program. And of course there was the inevitable question about wealthy dentists driving fancy cars (and therefore driving up the cost of dentistry). That was countered with some data that dental fees had not been increasing faster than average Australian wages over the past decade.

Across all of these stories was a common theme - that as a society we are simply not doing enough to support people to access necessary dental care. For the patient with Sjogren’s syndrome - we know that if that was a different medical condition affecting any other part of her body, she would have access to Medicare funded medical treatment and hospital care if required. But by some quirk of fate, our government (with the complicity of the dental profession at the time) decided that the mouth was not part of the body when dentistry was left out of the Medicare system in the 1970s, and that decision continues to haunt us today.

It’s time for that to change. The federal government still has not released their response to the Senate inquiry held last year, and it is unlikely that we will see additional funding for dental care in the budget on 14 May. But there is a palpable sense in the community that wants to see more public funding for dental care.

You can listen to the full episode here - and I encourage all dental practitioners to take the time to listen to the views of everyday Australians.