School dental screening programmes for oral health.

CONCLUSIONS: The trials included in this review evaluated short-term effects of screening, assessing follow-up periods of three to eight months. We found very low certainty evidence that was insufficient to allow us to draw conclusions about whether there is a role for traditional school dental screening in improving dental attendance. For criteria-based screening, we found low-certainty evidence that it may improve dental attendance when compared to no screening. However, when compared to traditional screening there was no evidence of a difference in dental attendance (very low-certainty evidence).We found low-certainty evidence to conclude that personalised or specific referral letters improve dental attendance when compared to non-specific counterparts. We also found low-certainty evidence that screening supplemented with motivation (oral health education and offer of free treatment) improves dental attendance in comparison to screening alone.We did not find any trials addressing cost-effectiveness and adverse effects of school dental screening. PMID: 29267989 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews - Category: General Medicine Authors: Tags: Cochrane Database Syst Rev Source Type: research