Dental Hygienists Can Do More
There are competent professionals that consider that dental hygienists do not get an opportunity to practice their skills and competencies. If dental hygienists had a chance to practice at the top of their license, they could help a lot of patients with oral health problems. One of the best examples of their possibilities is that they can actually help coordinate the primary care needs of patients suffering from diabetes and hypertension.
Those patients could also receive timely information on tobacco use and nutrition that would help them reduce the symptoms of their diseases and dental hygienists could actually play a vital role there. There are a lot of people that are diagnosed with different diseases but they do not have an opportunity to get timely guidelines to reduce the effects of the health condition. Most of such patients will not find the healthcare system manageable and patients need to have navigators in the form of professionals who can help but they do not have license for these services.
The same care and navigation may also be needed by older adults. You can only imagine how many adults who cannot take food because of dental pain and gum inflammation. And this problem can also be solved with attracting attention of dental hygienists and other specialists that may do a lot of good to the patients.
The mentioned problems are actual as only 10 of all retirees have dental insurance and Medicare does not provide the rest with the needed dental and oral health care. As a result, emergency rooms are full of people that suffer from acute dental pain as all they can do is to wait till they cannot manage it though using strong pain medications. There are also nursing homes where patients do not receive enough of oral hygiene as well.
Photo by askyes (flickr) [CC BY 2.0], undefined
