Title: Dentist Population Ratio of Bangalore City: Adequate or Inadequate-A Descriptive Study
Authors: Dr Dhanya.R, Dr Harikiran A.G, Dr Deepti Vadavi
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.18535/jmscr/v4i12.121
Abstract
Background: World Health Organization has raised the alarm that oral disease is one of the major public health problems. Current scenario indicates that the existing 180000 dentists are not sufficient to meet the oral health demands of population in India due to various reasons, one being misdistribution of dentists. Hence our study aims to estimate the Dentist Population ratio (DPR) of Bangalore City.
Methodology: The distribution of dentists in Bangalore City was estimated by calculating the Dentist Population Ratio. The number of dentists involved in private practice, govt. service and academics were calculated and compared with the population of Bangalore city. In order to look into the lacunae regarding the secondary data obtained from official sources, a mean correction factor was calculated from the manual survey in 8 wards of Bangalore City which were selected by random sampling.
Results: An official DPR of 1:2954 and corrected DPR of 1:1533 was estimated for Bangalore City. A total of 1843 dental clinics, 3687 dental practitioners, 28 government dentists, 1002 academicians were obtained after applying a mean correction factor of 2.6 and an average of 2 dentists per clinic.
Conclusion: The results of our study reveals that if any region in Bangalore City or Karnataka has a higher DPR than the WHO recommendation suffers from low availability of dentists, or reduced accessibility to dental services, it can be inferred that it is not due to a deficiency in the number of dentists, but due to a misdistribution of dental health care personnel.
Keywords: Misdistribution, Dentist Population Ratio, Oral Health, Dentists.
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