Dentists' Views on Providing Care for Residents of Long-Term Care Facilities

People living in long-term care (LTC) facilities face many oral health challenges, often complicated by their medical conditions, use of medications and limited access to oral health care.

To determine Manitoba dentists' perspectives on the oral health of LTC residents and to identify the types of barriers and factors that prevent and enable them to provide care to these residents.

Manitoba general dentists were surveyed about their history of providing care and their views on the provision of care to LTC residents. Descriptive statistics, bivariate analysis and logistic regression analysis were carried out.

Surveys were emailed to 575 dentists, with a response rate of 52.5%. Most respondents were male (62.8%), graduates of the University of Manitoba (85.0%), working in private practice (89.8%) and located in Winnipeg (72.4%). Overall, only 26.2% currently treat LTC residents. A predominant number of respondents identified having a busy private practice (60.0%), lack of an invitation to provide dental care (53.0%) and lack of proper dental equipment (42.6%) as barriers preventing them from seeing LTC residents. Receiving an invitation to provide treatment, professional obligation and past or current family or patients residing in LTC were the most common reasons why dentists began treating LTC residents.

Most responding dentists believe that daily mouth care for LTC residents is not a priority for staff, and only a minority of dentists currently provide care to this population.