Service patterns of public dental patients

Public dental health patients remain a group at risk of poorer oral health outcomes due to reported high levels of emergency care and associated higher levels of tooth extraction (DSRU, 1993). This report describes the service patterns of dentate public dental patients by age, sex, geographic location and type of visit based on a total of 1,549 dental patients who were examined by the dental authorities in three States/Territories of Australia, providing a representative sample of the public dental patients they treated during the 2001-02 period.