June 2013

Objective: To investigate the barriers and facilitators influencing the delivery of prevention in accordance with a national guideline (Delivering Better Oral Health, Department of Health England) in health service dental practice. Design: Self-completion questionnaire. Setting: Health service general dental practices. Subjects and methods: Questionnaires were sent via two mailings to all 508 dentists registered to work in health service general dental practice in Devon, South West England. Results: In total 266 questionnaires were returned (52% response rate). Examples of barriers and facilitators were evident at various organisational levels of dentistry. These were principally the healthcare system, practice (dental office) arrangements and professional factors. Respondents gave positive responses to questions concerning the flexibility (53%) and benefit of the guideline (63%) and they tended to indicate that they didn’t perceive problems in changing their old routines (58%). Opinion was divided among respondents on whether they felt patients followed their advice (49%). There was overall agreement that delivering prevention in practice is problematic if there are insufficient staff (68%), facilities (53%) and time (60%). Encouragingly most respondents felt adequately trained to deliver the evidence based prevention guidance (59%). Conclusions: This study has identified some barriers and facilitators to the delivery of prevention guidance in this group of health service dentists with no single factor viewed consistently as more important than any others. A further qualitative study is planned to investigate in more depth the reasons underpinning the responses given in this study. Key words: Promotion of health, oral health, general dental practitioners, England