To Örebro University

All children and adolescents living in Sweden have free dental care with regular check-ups. Yet, missed and cancelled dental appointments are not unusual. The overall aim was to explore potential explanatory factors associated with non-regular dental care and to seek a deeper understanding of why some adolescents fail to attend their dental appointments.

An integrative review (Paper I) identified and summarized different sets of environmental, individual and situational factors that could be associated with dental avoidance or non-attendance. Paper II found similar levels of dental fear between children and adolescents (8-19 yrs) with a Swedish or a non-Swedish background. The occurrence and patterns of missed dental appointments among 16–19-year-olds were investigated in Paper III, where we report that 13.1% of 23 522 booked dental appointments were missed in 2012. Boys had more missed appointments than girls, while no age differences were found. In a case-control design, adolescents with missed appointments more often had sociodemographic load, dental fear or dental behaviour management problems, poor oral health, emergency visits, tooth extractions, operative treatments, and over the past years, more missed and cancelled appointments. A history of missed and cancelled dental appointments predicted future missed and cancelled appointments. Twelve adolescent girls with missed appointments were interviewed in Paper IV and described several potential barriers or facilitators to accessing dental care. They highlighted that knowing what will happen during the dental visit was decisive to whether or not they would attend their appointments.

In conclusion, factors specifically associated with dental avoidance still need to be investigated. Dental fear should still be seen as potential causal factor for dental avoidance. Missed and cancelled dental appointments should never be ignored since they could predict future missed and cancelled appointments. The results indicate that missed dental appointments among adolescents remain a challenge for Swedish dental care.