Presence and extension of the attributes of primary health care in public dental services in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul State, Brazil.

The objective was to compare the presence and extension of primary health care (PHC) in oral health services using the PHC attributes according to three different types of PHC organizational arrangements: Family Health Strategy (FHS), Community Health Service (CHS) and Traditional Primary Care (TPC). This is a cross-sectional study carried out between 2011-2013, following a cluster random sampling strategy. Adult users were interviewed from 15 health services of that 6 were managed by the CHS, 4 by the FHS and 5 by the TPC and which had the same oral health team for at least two years. The final sample was 407 users interviewed using the Primary Care Assessment Tool - Oral Health of Adults evaluation instrument and a sociodemographic questionnaire. PHC scores were calculated and transformed on a scale ranging from 0 to 10. For high scores, the cut-off point > 5.5 was used. Most of the interviewees were females, for the three types of services. The performance of CHS and FHS was higher than those of TPC in almost all attributes (p < 0.05). The extent of PHC attributes in services was poor (overall highest score was 5.75 in CHS). The CHS was the only service witch half of the users (83; 49.1%) rated oral health services as having a high overall score for PHC. It is concluded that there were differences among the organizational arrangements of PHC oral health services, however, there is much to be improved in the orientation of dental care services for PHC. More studies are necessary to evaluate the differences in PHC services considering oral health.