• Journal of dental hygiene science
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• v.12 no.6
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• pp.675-681
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• 2012

Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare started to implement oral health hub center to provide oral health preventive program and dental treatment to public, especially dental vulnerable class in 2006. But, there is no applicant area to implement it regardless of national budget arrangement in 2012. This study is aimed to investigate the reason not to be implemented and requirements of implementation. 293 among 1,000 public dental hygienists in the area where have not implemented oral health hub center were surveyed in Korea from April to July in 2012 through convenience sampling. The questionnaire consisted of the reason why oral health hub center have not been implemented, the requirement of implementation, duty area and duty position et al. After removal of insufficient responses, 217 questionnaires were analyzed by t-test and ANOVA using SPSS 20.0. The reason why oral health hub center have not been implemented were deficiency of the priority list as compared with other health program (72.4%), space insufficiency (71.4%), regional budget insufficiency (70.5%), will insufficiency of oral health promotion (70.5%) and manpower insufficiency (62.7%). The first requirement of implementation were space expansion and regional budget expansion, followed by reduction of record-originated and administrative tasks, understanding on oral health program of higher ranking public officials in health center, manpower expansion, reduction of other tasks than oral health program and volunteer source expansion. Budget insufficiency and manpower insufficiency in Metropolis were ranked higher than other area (p<0.05). The group not to discuss oral health hub center graded each reason not to be implemented significantly higher than the other group (p<0.05). We suggested that to promote the importance of public oral health program be needed to public and higher ranking public officials to implement oral health hub center. In addition, we insisted that more dental manpower and budget be needed for reduction of oral health inequity in metropolis.