LAUSR

Poor oral health is a major cause of morbidity in children and can result in pain, poor eating, hospital admissions, general anesthetics, and significant expense.[1,2] Dental caries is a major contributor to this poor oral health. Even today, dental caries remains the one of the most, if not the most common, health problems in children globally.[2] We found in Australia that only 40% of children under 5 years of age had ever seen a dental professional,[3] so how can dental professionals improve child oral health if they do not even see the children? Using record linkage of available administrative data (births, hospital admissions, intellectual disability, and birth defects) for the total population of western Australia, we investigated the characteristics of children having a hospital admission for a dental reason.[4] In this work, which we believe is some of the earliest use of a data linkage approach to investigate dental hospital admissions internationally, we found that children with intellectual disability or birth defect were much more likely to have a dental hospital admission as were children living in areas where the water supply was nonfluoridated.[4,5] The advantage of total population data linkage is that those who are disadvantaged are included in the research without imposition on their time, yet they are the participants who are often lost to follow‐up in studies with other designs.