Overall, people living in regional and remote areas of Australia have poorer oral health than those living in Major cities (COAG 2015), and oral health status generally declines as remoteness increases. People living in rural areas have access to fewer dental practitioners than their city counterparts, which, coupled with longer travel times and limited transport options to services, affects the oral health care that they can receive (COAG 2015; Bishop & Laverty 2015).
People living in Remote and Very remote areas are also more likely to smoke and drink at risky levels. They have reduced access to fluoridated drinking water and face increased costs of healthy food choices and oral hygiene products. These risk factors contribute to this population’s overall poorer oral health (COAG 2015).
Royal Flying Doctor Service
The Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS) provides a comprehensive range of primary healthcare services throughout Australia. After recognising that a large proportion of people living in remote and rural Australia do not have access to a regular dental service, the RFDS established their dental service designed to support communities in country Australia. These services are provided using ‘fly-in fly-out’, mobile and outreach delivery models and are funded by the Commonwealth of Australia, state governments, private investments or the use of donor funds (Gardiner et al 2020).
The RFDS are committed to providing primary healthcare services to those in need, and, using ‘access to a primary healthcare service within a 60-minute drive time’ as one measure of reasonable access, identified that close to 119,000 people did not have access to general dental services (RFDS 2022). This included around 11,500 people in the West Pilbara region, around 10,300 in the Alice Springs region and around 9,500 in the Daly-Tiwi-West Arnhem region (RFDS 2022).
The following data has been sourced from the RFDS administrative patient dataset (unpublished) and covers the period 2018 to 2022. Due to differences in reporting periods and analysis methodology, figures presented here may not match those presented by the RFDS.
The RFDS provided over 25,000 clinical dental services each year between 2018 and 2022 to individuals in regional and remote areas across Australia. The number of clinical dental services provided ranged from around 25,300 in 2020, a year affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, to around 48,900 in 2022.
Explore the data further in RFDS interactive 1.
