Thai Dentists’ Experience and Opinions on Dental Health Services for Insured Persons
Objective: To investigate Thai dentists’ experience and opinions on dental health services for insured persons, including problems and suggestions.
Materials and methods: A cross-sectional survey was conducted using a mailed questionnaire between July and September 2016. Purposive sampling involved 2,998 dentists working in the public and private sectors in 12 provinces of Thailand. The questionnaire was developed from a literature review. It comprised seven questions regarding general information and 15 questions regarding experience, opinions, problems and suggestions on dental health services for insured persons. Descriptive statistics, such as percentage, mean, standard deviation, median and interquartile range, were used to analyze the results.
Results:Three hundred and sixty four completed questionnaires (12.4%) were returned. Most of the responding dentists worked in private clinics (83.2%) and 99.0% had experience on dental health services for insured persons. The most common services provided were scaling (98.3%), restoration (97.8%) and extraction (97.2%). Most of the dentists (67.4%), especially those who worked in private clinics, disagreed with the concept of providing dental health services in the insured person’s workplace because of insufficient manpower, instruments, materials and time, as well as management of sterility. The responding dentists also disagreed with the fixed registration and reimbursement systems used by hospitals or clinics (45.5% and 45.2% respectively). Their opinions on the types of covered dental health services in the national social security scheme were not adequate (66.9%). They thought that dental disease prevention and yearly check-ups should be included. Over 80% of the dentists agreed that dental health services’ fees should be increased. The main problems with the dental health services included inconvenient patient reimbursement, lack of patient reimbursement for some dental health services, lack of patient knowledge regarding the types of covered dental health services and patient requests for falsified documents to claim reimbursement. Suggested changes to the system comprised improvements in types of covered dental health services, dental health services fees, the reimbursement system and dissemination of the types and fees of covered dental health services.
Conclusions: Dentists working in both public and private sectors had experience on dental health services for insured persons. Dentists’ opinions on the dental health services system and insured persons’ rights varied with the different contexts of workplaces, especially in terms of manpower, equipment and materials. Meanwhile, the problems and suggestions were similar.
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