[Report 1969] / School Medical Officer of Health, Nottingham City.

  • Nottingham (England). City Council.
Date:
1969
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1969] / School Medical Officer of Health, Nottingham City. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    mental scheme for their training has proved a great success, there are no immediate plans for the creation of a new training school. We are now faced with a situation where the recruitment of auxiliaries is proving as difficult as dental officers which would seem to defeat the object of the experiment. Dental Health Education: During 1969, 129 Sessions were devoted to this most valuable addition to the activity of the dental service. Most of these were utilised by the dental auxiliaries who spent the first part of the year manufacturing material for forthcoming visits to schools. They also visited the Oral Hygiene Service in London, seeking and finding most valuable advice. Initially, they concentrated their activities on the pre-school groups, but, in the latter part of the year began tentatively to visit schools and plan with individual Headteachers, programmes of oral hygiene instruction, tailor- made for each school. I am sure that this is but a small beginning to a subject which is to prove of fundamental importance in the improvement of the dental health of Nottingham schoolchildren. Dental Inspection: During 1969, 11,277 (21 % of the school population) had a routine dental inspection in school and 6,370 (11 % of the school population), were inspected as special or casual patients. A total of 17,647 (32% of the school population) therefore, were inspected. Although this shows an improvement of 8% over 1968, the situation is far from ideal. Each child should be dentally inspected at least twice each year; this seems an unattainable goal in the light of current circum¬ stances. However, I am hopeful that the presence of new staff during 1970 will provide a substantial improvement in the number of children examined. Dental Treatment: A summary of the dental treatment provided is shown in the appendix. Comparative figures for 1968 are also shown. It is interesting to examine a histogram showing the pattern of dental treatment throughout the Sixties. During the first half of the decade, effort was concentrated on providing an extraction service and it was not until 1966 that the numbers of fillings exceeded the number of teeth removed. An examination of the ratio of permanent teeth extracted/permanent teeth filled, in the last five years shows a generally favourable trend except for 1968 when there was an acute shortage of professional staff. However, a comparison with the ratio for the School Dental Service nationally (1:6-0) illustrates well that, in Nottingham, the emphasis has, by dint of circum¬ stances, been placed on the provision of an emergency service.