Source: Radio New Zealand
Wait-times increased significantly during the Covid-19 pandemic. (File photo) AFP/ Thibaut Durand/ Hans Lucas
Nearly 5000 children with rotten teeth are waiting in pain to have them surgically extracted.
Health NZ figures show as of September, there were 4866 children and young people on the dental surgery wait list – an increase of 900 in two years.
The Dental Association’s director of policy, Dr Robin Whyman, told Nine to Noon, the waiting list was down slightly in the last year due to huge efforts across the sector, partly in response to the government’s target to reduce wait times.
“The way to get a feel for this however, is not so much to look at the waiting list number or the total that are treated, but to look at the number being treated per thousand head of population.
“If we go back to 1990, it was about one per thousand. At the end of 2019 (the last time there was any research done on this), it was about four per thousand.
“So about a four-fold increase in that 30-year period.”
The Dental Association’s director of policy, Dr Robin Whyman. (File photo) Supplied
Children in pain
Sometimes general anaesthetic was needed because very young children were needing multiple baby teeth removed, or the children had disabilities or behavioural problems, which made it difficult for them to tolerate teeth extractions.
“Some children are definitely in pain and we find that some of those children are needing to access their GP to get pain relief and antibiotics.
“Some are then connecting back in to the dental service, and needing needing another appointment to have that managed.”
Sometimes wait lists had to be juggled, Whyman said, to accommodate children who developed more severe pain.
“So managing pain for children on the waiting list is a significant part of the issue with a waiting list of this size.”
There was more acceptance of the “safety” of general anaesthetic, but the longer wait times were mainly due to more decay, less access to early dental care and workforce shortages, he said.
“One of the things we have in New Zealand is a community oral health service, which is enrolling children at birth or quite soon after birth, but struggling to then provide those regular dental checks and dental access because of long waits in that service and particularly staffing issues.”
Wait times escalated hugely following Covid-19, which also coincided with a wave of retirements by dental health therapists.
They had been increasingly replaced by oral health therapists, who had a much wider scope of practice and were spread more thinly over older teenagers and even adults.
“So the problems with access to care had been escalating well before Covid, but that added another curve ball into the mix,” Whyman said.
The increase was partly due to greater acceptance of general anaesthetic safety, Whyman said, but mainly due to tooth decay from sugary drinks and foods affecting children at younger ages.
Dental decay was “not spread evenly across the population”.
“It’s heavily influenced by our environment and what the manufacturers are putting in the food and what they tell us they’re putting in the food. And children don’t have a lot of control over that at all, it’s really their family environment.”
Health NZ targeting wait times
Health NZ said improving wait times for dental surgery was part of “a broader strategy” to reduce elective surgery waiting times.
Work was underway to expand dedicated theatre sessions for paediatric dental surgical cases, including “twilight” sessions at Auckland Hospital and a monthly Saturday session in Whangārei.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand