Primary dental care: time to revise the definition? Prim Dent Care 2000. 7(3):93-96.

Abstract

Introduction As part of the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Faculty of General Dental Practice (UK), the editor has been asked to select important or memorable papers that have been published in Primary Dental Care since it was first published in 1994. To date, over 400 papers have been published in Primary Dental Care, so this has been no small task. I have selected two papers that have looked at the very roots of primary dental care and how it could (and should) evolve. They are the papers ‘Primary Dental Care: Time to Revise the Definition’, which was authored by John Morris, Deborah White and Gill Bradnock and published in the July 2000 edition and ‘A Specialism of Primary Dental Care’, which was authored by Andy Toy and Wayne Richards and published in the January 2004 edition. When read in conjunction with the debate between Roger Mosedale and Paul Batchelor on specialist lists, they make particularly interesting reading. In many respects, it is sad to see that the ideas promoted by Toy and Richards (2004) have been confounded in England and Wales by the dental contract of 2006 and that so little has changed in the last eight years. With so many papers to choose from and limited space available, I have opted to select the abstracts of six other papers, on the grounds that they all report highly relevant studies that were carried out in general dental practice by general dental practitioners. KENNETH A EATON, EDITOR, PRIMARY DENTAL CARE. Notable Papers in Primary Dental Care 1994-2012