Pedodontic manpower and productivity in North Carolina--a pilot project.

A pedodontic manpower and productivity pilot project was conducted utilizing the pedodontic private practitioners of North Carolina. The responses demonstrated a traditional pedodontic practice in the services performed even though the mean age of the practitioners was fair]y young. Most practitioners had a single office located in a fluoridated area. Productivity results indicated that relatively high percentages of the practices’ and the pedodontists’ time were spent in the areas of restorative, diagnostic, and preventive while the area of orthodontics contributed a small proportion. The dental profession of North Carolina has been very active over the past twenty years in assessing the dental needs of the state’s population, the supply and distribution of North Carolina dentists, and their productivity. 13 Office practice studies to date have concentrated on general practitioners; no data are available on the type and amount of services delivered in specialty practices in North Carolina, including pedodontics. In addition, little information is available about patterns of care in specialty practices at the national level. In an attempt to gain baseline data on pedodontic manpower and measure the office productivity of North Carolina pedodontists, a pilot project was conducted by the University of North Carolina Health Services Research Center and the American Academy of Pedodontics. This paper describes selected characteristics of North Carolina pedodontists and their practice. It was recognized at the outset that projecting future dental manpower needs for pedodontic care is a multi-faceted problem. Some of the maj or variables that must be considered in dental manpower planning include the following: 1. number of patients needing care, 2. number of patients seeking care, 3. number of pedodontists available to provide care, 4. number of general dentists also willing to provide child care, 5. extent of third party coverage, 6. relative economic situation of the area, 7. intake of systemic fluoride by the population, and 8. change in the type of services rendered by the practicing dentists. These factors all interplay to some degree either positively or negatively in each pedodontic office. The net results will be the summation of the situations for each pedodontist. Methods and Materials A current list of practicing pedodontists was obtained from the UNC Health Services Research Center and was checked against the membership in the North Carolina Society of Pedodontics. From these two sources 36 pedodontists solely in private practice were identified. Each pedodontist was telephoned to solicit their cooperation for the survey of their practice. The survey instrument was developed for pedodontists from the survey used in the 1976-1977 North Carolina Dental Manpower Study which in turn was derived from the protocol developed by the American Dental Association as part of their Dental Planning Information System. The instrument consisted of instructions and three sections: demographic information, practice characteristics, and daily logs of office productivity for all dental procedures performed by the dentist, hygienist, and/or chalrside assistant for two normal working days in the spring of 1980. Ten days after the surveys were mailed, each pedodontist was telephoned to provide instructions in completing the questionnaire and log, to answer any questions conPEDIATRIC DENTISTRY: Volume 4, Number 2 115 cerning the material, and to encourage completion of the survey. Data Analysis Totals, means, ;rod proportions of pedodontist and practice characteristics were computed. The differences in patient characteristics (age, race, sex, and utilization type) and type of procedure provided in relation to day of reporting were analyzed by Student’s t-test of the x2 test of independence. The differences in relati.on to day of reporting were not significant. Therefore, all presentations of patient characteristics ~ad services provided are of combined data.