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I was having chat with someone involved in the dental therapy aspect of the intervention.  I was quite impressed at the numbers of kids that they have managed to see – around 2000.  I remarked that they must have pulled a lot of teeth.  I shouldn’t be surprised by anything at this stage, but nevertheless I was by the response.  Very few teeth have been pulled, not because my take on dental therapy was quite crude, but because they weren’t offering treatment, but were doing follow-up checks on the referrals from the child health checks.  Of the 2000 children seen, only 16 received treatment at that point.

Of course, many of these were to be referred on (again) to hospital for their dental treatment, but the sheer stupidity in not resourcing this to provide treatment at that point, is astounding.