Experts fear young Australians will continue to fall victim to an oral health “blind spot” as the major political parties remain “stubbornly agnostic” about dental inclusion in Medicare.
The group of Australian society most likely to forgo dental care is young people. A recent study found young people are the least likely to access regular oral health services, and many never visit the dentist as a result.
The Melbourne University study urged policy reforms to address the vulnerability gap, which sees the child dental benefit program end at age 17 without strong financial support for young people transitioning into adulthood.
The study’s senior author, Associate Professor Ankur Singh, director of the Centre for Lifelong Oral Health at the University of Sydney, said Labor and the Coalition were “stubbornly agnostic” on the issue.
Both Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton made historic, multi-billion dollar Medicare commitments on the campaign trail, but “somehow oral health was completely ignored – there was no mention and no roadmap for what oral health would look like in this or the next government,” Singh said.
Like housing, dental care is a policy area where young people are at a disadvantage, and “the data clearly shows there’s a blind spot,” Singh said.
The study, recently published in the Journal of Dental Research, tracked dental visits for 11,189 participants aged 15 to 64 at three time points: 2009, 2013 and 2017.
The researchers found that almost all participants who were 15 at baseline had a high probability of visiting the dentist at least once every two years, but there was a “dramatic drop-off” between ages 15 and 20, and for a quarter of the population, the situation did not improve.
“Their dental visit rates dropped off suddenly, and a lot of them never came back,” Singh said. “That’s really scary.”
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