Distribution of Dental Schools and Dentists in Brazil: an overview in relation to labor market

• Autor(a) principal: San Martin, Alissa Schmidt
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Outros Autores: Chisini, Luiz Alexandre, Martelli, Stephani, Sartori, Letícia Regina Morello, Ramos, Ezequiel Caruccio, Demarco, Flávio Fernando
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por; eng
• Título da fonte: Revista da ABENO (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://revabeno.emnuvens.com.br/revabeno/article/view/399
• topic: Job Market. Health Services Needs and Demand. Dental Schools.; Mercado de Trabalho. Necessidades e Demandas de Serviços de Saúde. Escolas de Odontologia.

Considering the expansion of the Dental Schools (DS) and the increase in the number of dentists in Brazil, this study aimed to describe the distribution of DS and dentists in Brazil, as well as to compare the proportion of number of inhabitants by dentist (NI/dentist) with the World Health Organization (WHO) indicators. Data on the amount of DS and dentists were obtained through the Federal Council of Dentistry (Conselho Federal de Odontologia/CFO). The number of habitants estimated for each site was investigated by Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística/IBGE) data. The NI/dentist concentration was calculated to compare with the index recommended by the WHO. In order to analyze if the DS number is correlated to the dentists number and the NI/dentists, the Pearson correlation test was performed. We identified 220 DS, being mostly private (75%) and located in the Southeast (43.6%). The North region was the one that presented the least DS (10%). A total of 274,000 dentists were identified, mainly concentrated in the Southeast region (55.7%) followed by the South region (16.8%). Thus, Brazil presented twice more dentists than WHO recommends. Similar to this, all regions of Brazil have more dentists than recommended by WHO, and the Southeast presents approximately three folds more. A correlation of 0.98 was observed between dentists number and DS number while a correlation of 0.44 was observed between NI/dentist. Therefore, the Brazilian dental labor market is saturated, with a much larger number of professionals than the one recommended by WHO. Still, there is a concentration of professionals in the most developed and rich regions of the country.