Autism South Africa teams up with the Department of Community Dentistry

March 2013, Autism South Africa teams up with the Department of Community Dentistry to provide free dental care for children with autism.

Tooth decay (Dental Caries) continues to be a major public health problem across all ages, gender, races and social classes in South Africa. The current burden of oral diseases requires extensive resources that are simply not affordable in our country. Children and adults with special needs groups continue to be marginalised in terms of access to health resources and facilities in South Africa. For oral health, there is anecdotal evidence that special needs groups are at an even greater disadvantage due to their unique needs. It is against this background that the Department of Community Dentistry has undertaken to address the oral health needs of special needs groups in Groups in Gauteng.

Children and adults with Autism provide unique challenges to Dentistry in that the management and treatment of these patients requires time, patience, skills and resources that is far in access of what is currently available in the dental public health facilities in our country. Dentistry is one of the most expensive services to deliver and requires extensive resources especially for children with special needs as even the most basic types of treatment often need to be done under general anaesthesia.

The partnership with Autism South Africa and their feeder schools in Gauteng will serve as a pilot project that seeks to introduce oral health services via mobile facilities at school and /or institutions that serve the needs of children and adults with Autism. This will be a team approach involving teachers, therapists, and oral health professionals. The focus will be on prevention and oral health promotion so that these children (and adults) can maintain a healthy mouth. Additionally, we will attempt through a team approach to undertake basic oral health treatment in the state of the art mobile dental clinic which has been kindly sponsored by one of our partners in oral health care, Glaxo Smith Kline (GSK). We have dedicated a Friday morning session for this program and it will entail our team visiting the Autism School at the TMI Hospital to deliver oral health services to the children and adults with Autism. This initiative has the support of the Chief Dentist in the Johannesburg Metro.  We hope that this program will serve as a model for other institutions and countries that also have similar challenges in terms of special needs groups.