Inter-country application of standard epidemiology tools in oral health

If there is a single project which could demonstrate the intensive use of the WHO standard oral epidemiology methods which have been discussed and demonstrated in papers published elsewhere, it is the series of collaborative studies of oral health care systems referred to in brief as ICS-I and II. These consist of multi-country studies from which to assess the relative merits of different delivery systems based on interlinked clinical and sociological data for the consumer and sociological data for the provider. In both the ICS-I and II, each participating country team followed the same protocol and every effort was made to retain, for ICS-II, not only the same research strategy, but also as much of the methodology as possible. ICS-I covered the years 1973 to 1983: ICS-II began in 1988 and is due to end in 1995. A detailed description of the sampling, survey and analysis approaches is given in the first part of this article and highlights of the inter-country clinical data in the second part. Although ICS-I was hampered in its objective to compare relative strengths of delivery systems, or elements thereof, by the lack of comparative longitudinal data, its results had tremendous impact both for participating countries and others which could learn from the study findings. That impact was evident in the most practical form of wholesale changes in various systems and approaches and in application of study findings in constructing new systems. ICS-II data are intriguing both in the new examples they present and in comparisons over time, as well as in the improved methods developed as a result of lessons learned in ICS-I. The full report will be available in 1995.