Children's dental health in Europe. Clinical calibration of dental examiners in eight EU countries.

An epidemiological investigation has been initiated from Sweden with the aim to study and compare dental health, dental treatment needs and attitudes to dental care in two well-defined age-groups, children of 5 and 12 years of age, in eight EU countries. To ensure comparability of the clinical registrations, data collection was preceded by clinical calibrations of the examiners from the participating countries. All the examiners participated in a workshop with initial calibration exercises. Agreement, expressed as sensitivity, was measured between the Swedish examiner acting as the reference examiner and each of the other examiners in turn, and assessed separately for the two age-groups. For DMFS/dmfs, agreement ranged from 44.3% to 82.2%. These results were discussed and where necessary the criteria were modified and/or made more stringent, so that they were clearcut and could be adhered to consistently. In a second calibration between the Swedish and the national examiner undertaken in each of the seven countries, the inter-examiner agreement (sensitivity) varied between 85.4% and 100%. The mean sensitivity for DMFS/dmfs after the total calibration procedures was 89.5% for the 12-year olds and 91.7 for the 5-year olds. The mean sensitivity for both age-groups together was 90.6% and the corresponding value for specificity was 98.9%.