Health Screening and Oral Health Unit Director and State Public Health Dental Director, Texas Department of State Health Services
Disclosure(s):
Rhonda Stokley, DDS: No financial relationships to disclose
Description: Regional dental teams conduct school-based clinics to provide dental screenings to thousands of children across Texas. The Texas Oral Health Improvement Program wants to know if children who need treatment see a dentist. This information helps our program determine clinic effectiveness and identify improvement opportunities in referring children with treatment needs to the dentist. Last year, we piloted a dental need care management process in one of our public health service regions. We planned to track children who were identified as having an urgent dental need to see if they went to a dentist. This process involved getting buy-in from our regional dental team partner and school nurses. We created a form for nurses to use so the same questions were asked consistently. To keep it short, we had to decide what information was most important. We also had to develop a process for tracking our data. During the pilot year, we received follow-up information for 74 of the 93 children with urgent dental needs. Almost 40% of those children reported going to the dentist for necessary follow-up care. The most cited reasons for not going to the dentist were “No insurance” and “Too expensive.” We are continuing the project this year and have added a second public health service region. In this round table, we share our process, forms, and data collection. We also describe the pilot project’s successes and challenges.
Source of Funding:: Title V Maternal and Child Health Block Grant
