Health through the ages
Oral health is an important part of overall health and wellbeing at all stages of life.

Despite oral disease being mostly preventable and treatable, increased oral health risk factors and treatment complexities do exist for children, adults with special needs or medically compromised and the frail elderly.

Treatment planning is critical to success, in particular, determining the patient’s ability to tolerate and benefit from the proposed dental treatment.

Consideration of suitable treatment support strategies to enable the successful provision of oral health care may include sedation (oral or intravenous) or general anesthesia, for patients with limited to no ability to cooperate because of age, physical or cognitive limitations.

 Learning Objectives
• priorities and challenges in assessing and managing paediatric, special needs and frail elderly patients
• treatment supports including supplemental strategies to enable successful patient management
• importance and necessity for shared care between the specialist and general dental practitioner