Australia: Oral health at stake in federal election

HONG KONG/LEIPZIG, Germany: Health experts in Australia have urged all political parties to make oral health a greater priority in the upcoming federal election. In a statement released by the National Oral Health Alliance, a non-governmental body comprised of several dental and health organisations, they also called for the development of a sustainable dental workforce to allow people better access to oral health-care services.

Currently, Australians who are in need of public dental health-care services have to wait for long periods before they receive treatment. In some parts of the country, patients have to wait for between one to two years. As a consequence, figures suggest that one in three Australians decide to delay or avoid dental treatment altogether.

The incumbent Labor Party led by Prime Minister Julia Gillard claimed to have delivered more than 850,000 dental check-ups to teenagers under the 2008 Medicare Teen Dental Plan but failed to implement a new universal dental scheme as promised in the 2007 federal election. Their US$3,37 billion scheme called DentiCare, developed by the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission, has been opposed by the Coalition members in the Senate in favour of Medicare, an existing dental care scheme for patients with chronic conditions introduced by opposition leader Tony Abbott in 2007, when he was Minister for Health and Ageing. Labour recently established a taskforce to investigate dentists’ compliance with the Medicare scheme, which they say found that a substantial number of them failed to comply with the requirements.

Abbott has announced that he will seek to retain Medicare in case of an electoral win.

Australia will be able to vote for a new government on 21 August. Latest polls have predicted a tie between Labor and the Coalition of the Liberal Party and National Party.