Medical and dental pediatric integration: a widen view of health promotion

Abstract

Nowadays, early care in Pediatric Dentistry is a world tendency. In Brazil however, when we compare the patient access to Pediatric Dentists to the access to Pediatricians, an unbalanced situation is still found, both in public and private health systems. It is noticed that parents usually take their children to the pediatricians in their first year of life, what does not happen in relation to pediatric dentists. As a result, there are generally the occurrence of retarded treatments and delayed actions with curative procedures. The present study evaluates the integration between the pediatric dentists and the pediatricians in Salvador city, through semi-structured interview, whose results express that that relationship is not satisfactory. The integration between pediatric dentists and pediatricians may help to redefine the classic standards in children dentistry attendance, making it necessary to think of a health promotion conduct that, besides avoiding caries, involves the supervision and orientation of their growth and facial development, stimulating a balanced masticatory system from the morphologic, aesthetic and functional point of view.