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Box 5.5.3(continued)A broader Aboriginal Liaison Program was then established in late 2005 to build on theachievements in the north of Adelaide. The aim of the program is to improve oral healthoutcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people by increasing the numberwho access dental care. Five Aboriginal Liaison Officers are currently working withlocal Aboriginal Health Services and Aboriginal communities to develop sustainablepathways for referring clients to dental services and to increase knowledge about oralhealth care (SA government unpublished).Tooth decay is measured as the sum of the number of untreated decayed teeth (D),missing teeth (M) extracted due to caries 8 , and filled teeth (F) restored followingcaries (that is DMFT = D+M+F). While DMFT is used for permanent (adult) teeth,dmft (in lower case) refers to infant teeth and is derived in the same way as DMFT.The indicator DMFT=0 (dmft=0 for infant teeth) refers to caries-free teeth and isused to refer to the number/proportion of teeth that are free of decay (Armfield andRoberts-Thomson 2004).The data for this indicator are sourced from four published articles prepared by theAustralian Research Centre for Population Oral Health (Ellershaw, Spencer andSlade 2005; Jamieson, Armfield and Roberts-Thomson 2006a, 2006b; Jamieson andRoberts-Thomson 2006). The first part of this section reports on the extent of toothdecay among Indigenous and non-Indigenous children enrolled in school dentalservices in NSW, SA and the NT (Jamieson, Armfield and Roberts-Thomson2006a). The second and third parts focus on the dental health of Indigenous andnon-Indigenous children in the NT (Jamieson, Armfield and Roberts-Thomson2006b) and SA (Ellershaw, Spencer and Slade 2005), respectively. The fourth partpresents hospital dental admission and procedure rates based on separations datafrom 1297 public and private hospitals located across Australia (Jamieson andRoberts-Thomson 2006).Indigenous children’s dental health in NSW, SA and the NT combinedMeasures of tooth decay for Indigenous and non-Indigenous children enrolled inschool dental services in metropolitan and rural NSW, SA and the NT presented intables 5.5.1 and 5.5.2 are based on data collected over three 12-month periods; 2000for NSW, 2002 for the NT, and 2003 for SA. Of the 326 099 children examined,10 743 (3.2 per cent) were Indigenous (Jamieson, Armfield andRoberts-Thomson 2006a).8 Dental caries is a technical term for tooth decay.5.36 OVERCOMINGINDIGENOUSDISADVANTAGE 2007

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