ARCPOH will be conducting the 2016–2018 National Adult Oral Health Survey

As a result of an agreement between ARCPOH, Commonwealth Department of Health, State and Territory Health Departments, and with support from the Australian Dental Association and Colgate, ARCPOH will coordinate the 2016–2018 National Survey of Adult Oral Health (NSAOH 2), which marks 10 years since the last national survey of adult oral health (NSAOH 2004–06) was conducted.

The development of National Oral Health Surveys are core components of Oral Health Surveillance .The main aims of oral health surveillance are to assess population oral health outcomes and their determinants and to monitor them over time in order to inform policy makers, professional bodies and the public. For all of these reasons, it is highly recommended that national surveys be conducted periodically. In fact, the (draft) National Oral Health Plan 2015–24 calls for an adult and child survey to be conducted every 10 years.

NSAOH 2 will essentially be a cross‐sectional survey of a representative sample of people aged 15+ years across each State and Territory and will be comprised of two main components: 1) a National Dental Telephone Interview Survey (NDTIS) and 2) oral epidemiological examinations among the dentate population interviewed. A two‐stage, stratified, clustered random sampling design will be used to ensure a sufficient geographic distribution of participants from both urban and rural settings in all States and Territories.

For the NDTIS component, approximately 14,000–15,000 people will be interviewed by telephone in order to gather information on socioeconomic conditions, dental service use, service-mix, oral health behaviours, and other determinants of oral health. Dentate interviewees will be invited to participate in an oral epidemiological examination (the examination component) in line with current international standards for large-scale oral epidemiological studies. It is anticipated that up to 7,500 examinations will be conducted.

ARCPOH staff will coordinate all aspects of the study including overall supervision of the survey components, sampling, training of examiners, data management, preparation and quality control, data analysis and reporting while State and Territory teams will be responsible for conducting the oral epidemiological examinations. Field work is expected to commence mid-2016 and finish by end-2018.

Find out more

More information about this survey can be obtained by contacting ARCPOH (arcpoh@adelaide.edu.au).