Increasing access for citizens to health services, including dental care, is one of the primary targets of the Indonesian Ministry of Health. To assess progress toward this goal, we sought to describe the magnitude of unmet needs for dental care among Indonesians. Secondary data of nationally representative surveys conducted from 2003 to 2007 were analysed to describe the associations between unmet needs for dental care in different demographic groups. In average, 2.28% of the Indonesian population reported perceiving need for dental care and 0.74% reported utilizing dental care. The average of unmet need was 72.04%. Logistic regression analysis indicated that respondents who lived in rural areas, who were uninsured, had higher odds ratios in reporting unmet dental care needs. Perceived need for and utilization of dental care among Indonesians was found to be low. Moreover, the unmet need for dental care is relatively high. 1. Introduction In a WHO [1] publication, it is stated that one of the primary targets of the Indonesian Ministry of Health is to increase access for citizens to health services, including dental care. But facts indicated that dental health problems can still be found in almost every area in Indonesia. The Indonesian Basic Health Survey 2007 showed that the rates of edentulous were 2% of the whole population, and only 4.5% of them used dentures. The National DMF-T (Decayed Missing Filling Tooth) index was 4,85. The biggest component was missing teeth (M-T), which was 3.86, describing that in average every Indonesian has 4 teeth extracted or was indicated for extraction. Moreover, 17.6% of Indonesians aged 65 or older had lost all their teeth. This percentage is far from the WHO target of less than 5% edentulous for year 2010 [2]. One of the oral health objectives of the Indonesian Ministry of Health for 2010 is to increase in the proportion of Indonesians who utilize dental health care annually [3]. Given this situation, it is important to evaluate the extent of those who have a need for dental care but do not receive any dental treatments or in other words those who had unmet dental care needs. This kind of evaluation is important to study the impact of government’s policy to dental health in Indonesia. Nevertheless, there is a lack of information about how dental health care have changed over time causing the inability to assess the effects of government policies, whether these policies were leading toward or away from greater social justice. Therefore, the objective of this study was to assess the magnitude of unmet need for
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