Estimating dental manpower requirements on a statewide basis.

The North Carolina Dental Manpower Study undertook to use epidemiological data on dental disease, data on practice productivity, and estimates of treatment needs to arrive at more useful measures of dental manpower requirements on a statewide and substate regional basis. As in all attempts to plan for health manpower, the North Carolina study relied upon a measure of subjective judgment pertaining to the treatment/services required to deal with certain dental conditions. These judgments, however, were representative of the conventional standards of practice in North Carolina at the time of the study. Though certain important factors necessary to a complete assessment of dental manpower requirements were not directly measured in the study (e.g., consumer demand), estimates of the volume increase in dental-office practice-productivity were derived for the major categories of dental procedures and conditions. In North Carolina this technic is thought to represent a more meaningful approach to dental manpower planning than the conventional manpower-to-population ratio.