Dental Healthcare Accessibility in Underprivileged Populations

Abstract

Underprivileged populations, a constant component of society, face distinct medical issues. The medical issues faced by patients from underprivileged groups has some particularities derived from specific economic and social particularities (food scarcity, decreased financial resources to access quality healthcare), risk factors (poor dieting, smoking) and a de-emphasis of prophylactic measures (due both to financial reasons as well as a lack of medical information); additionally, these factors are augmented by a healthcare system with insufficient resources, which tends to prioritize life-saving procedures. Dental healthcare is mostly private, and an optimal access to it requires significant financial resources; additionally, the public system is largely unknown to the masses and only insures a few basic dental procedures. The main aim of this paper is to perform an ethical analysis of the problem of access to dental healthcare (both prophylactic and therapeutic) in underprivileged patients (from a socio-economic point of view), depending on the type on the model dental practitioner-patient relationship.