ACCESSIBILITY OF DENTAL SERVICES AND FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE IT, ACCORDING TO A SURVEY

Purpose: to analyze the accessibility of dental services for the people and the factors that affect it.Materials and methods. During 2024, according to the original author's program a cross-sectional survey of 478 people over 18 years of age, residents of the Ivano-Frankivsk region, there were conducted in the healthcare facilities of the regional center.Results. It was found that the majority of citizens either did not visit dentists for preventive examinations at all (44.6%) or did it irregularly (28.5%), mainly due to lack of money (65.1%) and lack of awareness of the such visits importance (41.5%). It has been established that for all respondents, regardless of whether they visit dentists for preventive purposes or not, the main determinants of using dental services were trust in the doctor (61.1%) and his/her reputation (59.6%), the price of services (56.3%), staff treatment of patients (49.2%), modern technologies and equipment (46.6–47.0%) in the healthcare facility. It was shown that for the majority of respondents, dental care was partially (64.6%) or completely (15.8%) inaccessible. The most accessible services were emergency dental care, i.e. those included in the State Medical Guarantee Program (58.7–60.6% recognized them as fully accessible), and the least accessible ones were high-tech and expensive services, such as implants (56.4% considered them completely inaccessible), briquettes (55.5%), and dental prosthetics (41.4%).Conclusions. It is necessary to develop a set of organizational measures to improve the accessibility of dental services, including preventive ones, at the state, regional, individual and community levels.