No-shows in dental care
– perspectives on adolescents’
attendance pattern
ANIDA FÄGERSTAD
Medical Science with a Specialisation in Healthcare Sciences
Örebro Studies in Medicine 202 I
ÖREBRO 20192019
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anida fägerstad was born in 1978, in Bosanska Gradiska, Bosnia and Hercegovina, and moved to Sweden in 1994. She has a Master degree in Oral Health Sciences at Jönköping University, Sweden. Anida has been working as a regis-tered dental hygienist since she graduated from Karlstad University in 2001. Since 2003, she has been working for Folktandvården Region Örebro County and for the last two years at the Department of Pedodontics in Örebro. In 2013, she began her PhD studies at School of Health Sciences, Örebro University and she attended the National Clinical Research School in Odontology between 2015 and 2018.
Despite the fact that all children and adolescents in Sweden have free dental care with regular check-ups, missed and cancelled dental appointments are not unusual. These missed and cancelled appointments may have a negative effect on both dental clinics and on patients’ oral health. Thus, the overall aim of this thesis was to explore potential explanatory factors associated with non-regular dental care and to seek a deeper understanding of why some adolescents fail to attend their appointments. Four studies were conducted. The integrative review (Paper I) included 21 research articles investigating factors that could be associated with outcomes defined as dental avoidance or non-attendance/non-utilization. Paper II investigated dental fear as measured by Children’s Fear Survey Schedule – Dental Subscale for self-ratings in a sample of 301 children and adolescents (8-19 years) with a non-Swedish or a Swedish background. Paper III was, in first part, based on epidemiological data on booked and missed dental appointments for 16-19-year-olds in one Swedish county during 2012. The second part of Paper III had a case-control design based on retrospective data from the dental records. Twelve adolescent girls with missed appointments were interviewed (Paper IV) and described several potential barriers or facilitators to accessing dental care.
The findings suggest that factors specifically associated with dental avoi-dance still need to be investigated. Dental fear should still be seen as potential causal factor for dental avoidance. Finally, missed and cancelled dental ap-pointments should never be ignored since they could predict future missed and cancelled appointments. Overall, the results indicate that missed dental appointments among adolescents remain a challenge for Swedish dental care.
issn 1652-4063 isbn 978-91-7529-307-3
