Health through oral health; guidelines for planning and monitoring for oral health care: a critical comment on the WHO model.

Recently a joint working group of WHO/FDI published guidelines for planning and monitoring oral health care. In the report a model for calculations of future need for dental manpower was introduced as an effective planning tool. An analysis of whether the WHO model is appropriate to calculate the future need for manpower planning was carried out. It appears that the model has serious methodological shortcomings. The model expects the user to know the future oral care needs concerning preventive, special group, surgical, orthodontic, and periodontal care. In calculating future needs for restorative and prosthetic care, the model restricts itself to looking back in time and roughly calculating what has happened in the past, assuming this will happen again.