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Strategies to improve access to and uptake of dental care for people experiencing homelessness in Australia: a grey literature review
Objectives: The poor oral health of Australians experiencing homelessness negatively affects their quality of life. Better oral health is associated with having annual dental check-ups. Peer reviewed literature describing strategies that improve access to and uptake of dental care for homeless people is limited. This review searched the grey literature to discover what strategies are used.
Methods: The Informit database and Google and Bing search engines were searched using the keywords “homeless and oral and dental services”. Bing and Google were searched unrestricted by site and Google was searched for sites ending in org.au. Searches were restricted to Australia from June 2008-June 2018. The first 300 websites were read and those describing, or linking to pages describing, a strategy that improved access to or uptake of dental care were included. Their content was evaluated using Adams et al’s (2017) taxonomy, summarised and common strategies were reported as a narrative description.
Results: Nineteen programs were described. Common strategies were; providing free care, in-reach care, outreach care and the need to work closely with support organisations.
Conclusions: To improve access to and uptake of dental care for people experiencing homelessness, dental services need to be free and organised in collaboration with support organisations.
History
Publication title
Australian Health ReviewISSN
0156-5788Department/School
School of Health SciencesPublisher
CSIRO PublishingPlace of publication
AustraliaRights statement
Copyright 2019 AHHARepository Status
- Restricted