All adults over 17?years of age have access to the Public Dental Service after the Finnish Dental Care Reform in 2001-2002. This study aimed to survey the treatment needs and treatment measures provided for adult patients and changes in these during the period 2001-2013.
Sing each person's unique identifier, demographic data on dental visits during the period 2001-2013 were collected from municipal databases in five PDS-units covering 320,000 inhabitants. The numbers of visitors, those in need of basic periodontal or caries treatment (CPI >?2 and D?+?d?>?0) were calculated for three age groups. Treatment provided was also calculated in 13 treatment categories. Trend analyses were performed to study changes during the study period.
Restorative treatments (968,772; 23.6%), examinations (658,394; 16.1%), radiographs taken (529,875; 12.9%) anaesthesia used (521,169; 12.7%) and emergency treatments (348,229; 8.5%) made up 73.8% of all treatment measures during the entire study period. Periodontal treatment (7.8%) and caries prevention (3.9%) made up a small part of the care provided and prosthetics and treatment of TMJ disorders were extremely uncommon (fewer than 1%). Treatments related to caries (restorative treatment, examinations, endodontics, emergencies, anaesthesia and radiographs) made up 60.4% of the dental personnel's treatment time. During the study period, statistically significant increasing trends were found for radiographs (p?