“During the meetings, there was lively debate about how to best gather data and use the data we had to successfully analyze the workforce,” he says. “First, we had to see what data about the workforce was out there. Who had it? We checked with all the regulatory bodies, the associations, and examining boards of different kinds.” of Deputy Ministers of Health (CDM) in 2004-05. In late 2005, it was approved by the CDM and subsequently received the endorsement of the federal, provincial and territorial ministers of health. Papadopoulos participated as a delegate representing the dental and oral health workforce and CDA made contributions to this effort. Similar initiatives have been undertaken since that time, and CDA participated in many of them. For example, CIHI invited participation from oral health stakeholders in some of its health data initiatives. These efforts, unfortunately, did not include wide-scale data collection on the oral health workforce or oral health care provision, so the lack of dental data persisted. The 2010s “Around this time, CDA took a more comprehensive approach internally to oral health care data,” says Papadopoulos. CDA made better use of its membership database and developed, collected and analyzed survey information. “We could calculate population to dentist ratios and other foundational and necessary analysis,” he says. CDA provides CIHI with this data related to dentistry on a regular basis. “We share information about how many dentists there are in each province, their age bands, some information about workforce supply, but it isn’t complex enough for future planning,” says Papadopoulos. For example, statistics related to retirement rates of dentists, either when they leave practice altogether or switch from full- to part-time are challenging to determine. CDAnet and the CDA ITRANS claim service, which transmit benefits claims from dentists’ offices to insurance carriers, have been in use since the early 1990s and 2004 respectively. “We realized that these platforms provided a rich data set, but there were privacy concerns for both patients and dentists that we had to navigate,” he says. “We knew it had the potential to provide some answers to questions about who goes to the dentist, what services are provided and the distribution of dental offices in Canada. And this information could be mapped as it evolved over time.” CDA has been working toward anonymizing the benefits data it has access to in order to protect the privacy of patients and dentists, but still be useful for workforce planning purposes. The OHCSSO hired consultants to create a model of the oral health workforce to help the organization make projections about future supply and demand. “For several years, my work included finding sources of data about the oral health sector and oral health indicators in general in Canada that could be used to create this model,” says Papadopoulos. Liaising with health data organizations in Canada such as the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) and other health provider organizations including the Canadian Medical Association, the Canadian Nurses Association and the American Dental Association, was an important part of this process. In 2005, OHCSSO published a report that explained that the data required to create a model of the oral health sector didn’t exist in Canada. “The information simply wasn’t there,” says Papadopoulos. “Which was very disappointing for us. How could we plan for the future when we didn’t know what the workforce was in the present or what oral health care people needed?” In 2007, the federal government’s Advisory Committee on Health Delivery and Human Resources shared a framework for collaborative pan-Canadian health human resources planning and an accompanying action plan. This was the culmination of efforts since 2002 when the federal government created a consultative committee regarding provincial and territorial health care workforces. “They wanted to try to include all the different kinds of health care workers into one model, including oral health,” says Papadopoulos. The framework was developed at the direction of the Conference The information simply wasn’t there, which was very disappointing for us. How could we plan for the future when we didn’t know what the workforcewas in the present or what oral health care people needed? Issues and People
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