Saskatchewan's school‐based dental program staffed by dental therapists: a retrospective case study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: The poor oral health of Saskatchewan's children, in concert with a significant shortage of dentists, prompted the province in the early 1970s to seek an alternative method of addressing the oral health care needs of children. The result was the Saskatchewan Health Dental Plan (SHDP), which trained and employed dental therapists in school-based clinics to provide basic dental care to all children. The program was initiated over the opposition of Saskatchewan's dentists. The purpose of this research was to provide information and data previously not documented in the refereed dental literature regarding the only school-based program staffed by dental therapists to ever exist in North America. METHODS: This case study reviews the program's planning, opposition, implementation, and achievements based on a comprehensive review of published articles as well as a search of the grey literature. Additionally, Saskatchewan Health provided annual reports for each year of the program's existence. RESULTS: During its thirteen years of existence, the school-based program proved popular with parents and achieved significant success in providing necessary dental care for children. It was terminated in 1987 by the newly elected provincial Conservative government, which was not supportive of such social programs. CONCLUSIONS: The SHDP serves as a successful model of school-based dental care for children. However, the termination of the plan demonstrates the vulnerability of publicly funded dental health programs to conflicting political ideologies and special interest groups.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".