The primary dental care workforce.

With health care reform at the forefront of our nation's policy agenda, an assessment of the current status of the dental primary care workforce is required as an essential reform component. There has been much written in the literature about manpower but relatively little about the primary dental care workforce. The purpose of this paper is three-fold: 1) to describe the current primary dental care workforce; 2) to identify the distribution of this workforce; and 3) to describe the current delivery system. Characteristics, distribution, and delivery systems of the primary dental care workforce in the private and public sectors are described, and workforce issues relevant to health care reform are identified for future discussion.