Factors affecting the performance of periodontal specialty in secondary oral health care in Brazil

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to investigate, at a national level, which individual factors of the work process/infrastructure are associated with the achievement of goals in the periodontics specialty in Brazilian Dental Specialty Centers (BDSC). METHODS: This was a quantitative, analytical, cross-sectional study. Secondary data from DATASUS and the external evaluation of the second cycle of the BDSC Access and Quality Improvement Program were used. Variable description was carried out in the first stage, and then the bivariate Poisson regression was performed to verify possible associations between the variables and the outcome (achievement of goals in Periodontics in the BDSC). In this analysis, the covariates that were associated with the outcome at the p <0.20 significance level were included in the next step of the analysis. Multivariate Poisson regression with a robust estimator was then performed with those that met the above criterion. The variables that showed a p value < 0.05 were considered in the final model. RESULTS: The outcome was achieved in more than seven months of the year (mean 7.03 months, SD 4.20). Most BDSC monitored the established goals (93.2%), had referral as the only way of access (61.7%), had only municipal coverage (68.4%), carried out planning and periodic evaluation of actions (89.2%). A minority has quotas of procedures by Oral Health teams (OHTs) in Primary Health Care (PHC) (18.8%). The presence of a specialist in periodontics was (on average) 1.16 per BDSC and the sum of the workload of dentists working in this specialty was 31.1 hours (SD = 23.9). CONCLUSION: It was concluded that the individual factors of the work process/infrastructure associated with the achievement of goals in periodontics in Brazilian BDSC are: monitoring of established goals, BDSC scope and number of professionals working in the specialty.