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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Brian C. Quinn, PhD, Research and Evaluation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, PO Box 2316, Princeton, NJ 08543-2316, 908-232-5326, bquinn@rwjf.org

Preventive oral health care services are important and cost-effective tools for improving oral health. A large body of literature has examined many individual-level predictors of preventive care utilization. However, no known research has analyzed the impact of community-level factors on use of these services. This study examines the association between community-level unemployment and preventive oral health care utilization by a dentally insured population. The analysis uses data from the Seattle-Bellevue-Everett Primary Metropolitan Statistical Area and the Spokane Metropolitan Statistical Area for the 120 months from January 1995 to December 2004. Data were obtained from Washington Dental Services, the state's Delta Dental plan, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The study uses a Box-Jenkins ARIMA time series method to measure the association between the variables over time. This approach controls for autocorrelation, trending, and seasonality in the data, as well as for confounding variables that could lead to spurious conclusions. Preliminary results suggest that community-level unemployment has a negative and statistically significant association with preventive oral health care utilization. In the Seattle area, an unexpected 10,000 unit increase in the number of unemployed individuals is associated with a 1.2% decrease in preventive oral health care visits during the month (p=0.0076). In the Spokane area, a similar increase in unemployment is associated with a 1.5% decrease in monthly preventive oral health care visits. However, this result is only marginally significant (p=0.0565). These findings are important for administrators of health systems, policymakers interested in promoting preventive service use, and dentists and their practices.

Learning Objectives:

• Identify the importance of community-level factors on preventive oral health care utilization.
• Recognize the utility of time series methods for answering questions in oral health research.

Keywords: Prevention, Oral Health

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Not Answered