TALES OF THE ‘MURDER HOUSE’
When our national School Dental Service was wound down and finally disintegrated in the closing years of the 20th century, few mourned its demise. But its absence is still reverberating like a treadle drill 30 years later. Each year, thousands of children end up in hospital having rotten teeth extracted under general anaesthetic because, for various reasons, they fall through the cracks in the current system.
Dental anxiety remains common throughout the world. About a third of people experience it.
Now that the Government is replacing district health boards with a new national health system, should there also be a return to a national school dental service, with clinics attached to schools?
That would make no economic sense, says Dr Martin Lee, a public health researcher and the Canterbury District Health Board’s community dental service clinical director.
School dental clinics were phased out in the 1990s and early 2000s after decades of cost-cutting and that created a legacy restructuring of poorly maintained buildings and outdated equipment.
The “hub and spoke” Community Oral Health Service that replaced them has had its failures. Nevertheless, the days of
