Não comparecimento às primeiras consultas odontológicas na atenção secundária em um município mineiro de grande porte

Abstract

The failure to scheduled dental appointments, especially that related to secondary dental care in Belo Horizonte, is not a recent problem, and represents health impacts, damage to the resolution and comprehensive care, and unnecessary costs to the health system. In this study we used the quantitative method in order to identify and analyse possible factors associated with no-shows to the first dental scheduled visits in 2011 of individuals living in Belo Horizonte, belonging to both genders, 18 years age or older and referred by primary care to four selected dental specialties: oral surgery, endodontics, periodontics and temporomandibular dysfunction in Center-South Polyclinic. Research was performed on a database obtained from the Regulation System of Municipal Health Department of the Municipality of Belo Horizonte (SMSA / PBH). The response variable was the "no-show" of the individual at the first scheduled secondary care dental appointment and the independent variables were age, time in queue, gender, health district and dental specialty to which the individual was referred to. We used the Mann-Whitney and chi-square test for bivariate analysis and Poisson regression with robust variance for multivariate analysis. Tests were conducted with a significance level of 5% and a confidence interval of 95%. Among the first 6428 dental visits scheduled for 2011, to the four specialties selected for analysis, 32.9% were not performed due to the absence of the individual. From the bivariate analysis we observed a statistically significant association between the individual non-attendance to the first dental visit and the five independent variables: age (p <0.001), time on queue (p <0.001), gender (p = 0.003) district health the individual was from (p = 0.001) and the dental specialty to which he/she was referred (p 0.001). Multivariate analysis has revealed that all variables were independently and significantly associated with the event. Young adult male resident in certain health districts, referred to surgery and endodontics specialties, and that were longer in the queue, had a higher frequency of no-shows to the first scheduled dental visits for 2011 in Center-South Polyclinic.