On World Oral Health Day, the assistant secretary of state for Health closed a ceremony to present the expansion of the pilot project to include dentistry in the primary services of the National Health Service (SNS), saying he hoped that, by the end of the first half of the year, there would be dentists offering oral health services at health centres across the country.
“Last year we started out with 13 [dentists at health centres], we hope that by the end of the year we will have another 50 on board and the aim is to up that number, because the Portuguese are in great need of this”, he told journalists at the end of the ceremony.
Fernando Araújo noted the “great liaison” between the general practitioner team and the dentists, which he said was a “benefit.”
According to Araújo, including dentists in the SNS units should be done gradually and sustainably so that “there is no turning back.”
“Inclusion of these physicians is for good, it’s for the future. The SNS has to respond in terms of oral health and it will certainly do that,” he said.