| Summary: | 碩士 === 亞洲大學 === 健康產業管理學系健康管理組 === 100 === Background：This study uses a nationwide population-based dataset to compare the utilization of preventive dental service for children aged less than 6 year olds with and without intellectual disability (ID) in order to define the pattern of preventive dental care needs and various factors that are associated with dental prevention service, which if modified, could improve the utilization of such service in Taiwan.
Method：
Design: A population-based and cross-sectional study. Administrative claims data obtained from the Taiwan National Health Insurance Research Database covering the periods 1996—2007 was used to examine children are utilized by preventive dental care program between 2004 and 2007 (n = 28,342) to determine whether they had visited dental care providers in 2007 for fluoride-gel application.
Setting: Taiwan.
Main outcome measures: Independent variables included children’s gender, intellectual disability status, level of disability, parents’ income, the geographical location by Bureau of National Health Insurance (BNHI) in Taiwan and urbanization level of children’s residences. Dependent variable of this study is to have preventive dental service within last six months. Chi-Square test, multivariate logistic regressions were performed in this study.
Result：5643 of the children (19.91%) had visited dental care providers for preventive dental care during 2007. After adjusting for other factors, the odds of such visits by females were found to be 1.123 times more likely to receive preventive dental care service than their male partners, with the odds decreasing with children’s urbanization level. Children residing in southern*NHI of Taiwan were more likely to use preventive dental health service than those living in Taipei*NHI. The odds of usage of preventive dental health service for children in general population were 1.27 times as high as those for intellectual disabled children, while those who have parents with low income were 0.858 and 0.735 times those with medium income from the regression model in both of children with and without ID . Overall tendency of the usage of preventive dental program by children with and without ID from 2004 to 2007 in Taiwan has been increasing among two groups.
Conclusion：Children’s gender, geographical location by BNHI, urbanization level, intellectual disability status, and parents’ income all have significant associations with preventive dental care usage, and this usage rates has been increasing from 2004 to 2007 in both children with and without ID. Although fluoride gel service is available free of charge for all children every six month in Taiwan, findings of present study revealed that children have parents with low income had lower percentage of fluoride gel usage than those have parents with high and medium income among children with and without disability. Therefore, health authorities need to target children from low income family and may plan some policies for them.
|
|---|
