Dental services
http://www.ssb.no/english/subjects/03/02/tannhelse_en/
03.02 Health services
Unrevised figures are published 15th of Mars each year.
Preliminary figures are published 15th of June each year.
Final figures are published as soon as the figures on municipal health and care statistics are final.
The statistics are presented on county level.
Division for Health Statistics
Lov om tannhelsetjenesten av 1. januar 1984 § 6-2, Statistikkloven av 16. juni 1989 § 2.2, samt Statistikklovens § 3-2 (Administrative registre)
Non
Since the beginning of the 1970s, the Norwegian Board of Health has collected data about the dental health service. The collection of data from the county dental officers has been a part of KOSTRA (Municipality-State-Reporting) since it was implemented. As a result, Statistics Norway has collected data on dental health care services and the dental health of children since 2001. The collection includes information on scope, dental health results, personnel and finance data in the public dental health care. In addition, the statistics include information about personnel in the private dental health care.
The statistics provide information on counties and are used by organisations, researchers, media and the public in general. Furthermore, municipalities and counties, as well as government agencies such as the Ministry of Health and Care Services, the Directorate for Health and Social Affairs and the Norwegian Board of Health are important users of the statistics. The Norwegian Board of Health has the overall responsibility for the dental health care system, and uses the statistics in this work.
The statistics cover public dental health care in Norway. Data concerning the scope of the public dental health care system, personnel and finance data, as well as children's dental health are collected. In addition, information about personnel in private dental health care is collected.
The information on personnel in public and private dental health care also covers foreigners with a short-term stay in Norway working for a Norwegian employer. The observational units are individuals (persons), but the statistics include all active employments per person. The statistics include everyone who has worked for at least one hour at the reference time (fourth quarter). This corresponds to the definition used in the Labour Force Survey (LFS) and the national accounts.
Statistics on the public dental health care system are mainly collected in KOSTRA form 43. There are some exceptions:
The total number of children aged 1-18 years and 3-18 years is taken from Statistics Norway's population statistics per 31.12. This also applies to youth aged 19-20 and the remaining adult population. This has been the procedure since 2001.
As of 2003 the number of elderly, long-term ill and disabled people in home nursing per 31.12 has been collected from the municipalities in KOSTRA form 6, while the number of elderly, long-term ill and disabled people in institutions has been collected from the municipalities in KOSTRA form 5.
As of 2003 (2002 for the private dental health care sector) almost all the information on personnel from public and private dental health care has been collected from different administrative registers. Data on personnel not collected through registers include information concerning the number of dentist A man-years, and the number of vacancies in man-years per 31.12. These data are collected in KOSTRA form 43. Dentist A man-years are collected to keep track of the number of such man-years and are not part of any calculation of man-years in the statistics.
Register-based personnel information
The information is based on several registers. The main sources for register-based statistics about health care personnel are the Register of Health Care Personnel, administered by the Directorate of Health and Social Affairs, and the Register of Educational Attainment of the Population (BHU), administered by Statistics Norway. Information on the employment of employees and self-employed people is taken from the National Insurance Administration's Register of Employees, the End of the Year Certificate Register, the Register of Tax Forms administrated by the Directorate of Taxes, the Central Register of Establishments and Enterprises and various registers of salaries for employees in the municipal and state sector.
The Central Register of Employees is the main data source for employees, while the End of the Year Certificate Register is an important supplement because it incorporates employments for which there is no obligation to submit reports to the Central Register of Employees. The unit of both registers is employments (jobs). The Register of Tax Forms is the main source of information on self-employed people. The Central Register of Establishments and Enterprises provides information about the enterprises (workplace). In addition, supplementary data is taken from a number of other sources: the SOFA Register (administered by The Directorate of Labour), which provides data on registered unemployment and participants in employment programmes, information from the National Insurance Administration's registers of confinement benefits and receivers of cash-for-care, the register of retirement pensioners and disability pensioners, and Statistics Norway's register of sickness absence certified by a doctor.
The definition of employee is therefore based on a number of different sources. Statistics Norway has developed a system for the common utilisation of these.
This is a full count. It presents data on public dental health care in the counties, as well as on personnel in public and private dental health care.
The collection of data, with the exception of the majority of personnel information and some population figures (see 3.2), is done via KOSTRA once a year. The county dental officers fill in a form that is sent electronically to Statistics Norway.
Register-based personnel information
The Register of Health Care Personnel, administered by the Directorate of Health and Social Affairs. This register gives an overview of all health care personnel licensed to practise their profession. Statistics Norway receives the status per 1 October for personnel licensed to practise. The register only contains educations for which state authorisation is required, and therefore does not contain information about all health care educations. People with a health care education who have not applied for a licence are not included. The register may also include people who have been granted a Norwegian licence, but who have not necessarily practised their profession in Norway.
Register of Educational Attainment of the Population (BHU)
Statistics Norway's register of education is a supplement to the Register of Health Care Personnel. This register gives an overview of the highest education completed for all individuals resident in Norway per 1 October in the year before the statistics are produced.
The Register of Employees
Statistics Norway receives data on changes in the employee register from the National Insurance Administration on a weekly basis. In addition, a full extract of data is carried out once a year.
The End of the Year Certificate register
Concerning information from the Directorate of Taxes' End of the Year Certificate Register, two extracts making up the basis for the figures in this statistics are made; one preliminary extract in March and one extract in May.
The Tax Register
All tax offices use information technology to process individual tax returns. Information from the tax returns is available in electronic format. Statistics Norway collects statistical material from the Directorate of Taxes annually.
The Central Register of Establishments and Enterprises
Variables concerning enterprises, such as the municipal location of workplace and industry, are collected from the Central Register of Establishments and Enterprises, administered by Statistics Norway.
Statistics Norway carries out automated sum-controls and logical controls of the data reported in forms by the county dental officers. The controls are activated in the electronic forms as they are filled in and after they have been submitted. The data are compared with information submitted in previous years. The county dental officers are contacted if there is a lack of information, or when there are large discrepancies in the data on the basis of comparisons and evaluations. In such cases the county dental officers submit new data or give an explanation of the conditions related to the figures.
Register-based personnel statistics
For the three most central registers concerning the production of statistics, checks and revisions follow this procedure:
The National Insurance Administration conducts an annual control of the Register of Employees. Employers using manual reporting receive lists of all individuals registered with an active employment. Errors are reported to the social security offices. Statistics Norway controls that establishments with subsidiaries have separate figures for each enterprise and that the employees are registered with the correct enterprise. Errors are corrected in the statistics, and employers are informed via the National Insurance Administration in order to make sure that the revisions are entered in the register. This is important in order to ensure correct information about industry and municipal location of the workplace.
Statistics Norway controls the Register of Employees by comparing it with the Brønnøysund Registers, the End of the Year Certificate Register, the SOFA Register's statistics of unemployment etc.
The revision of the End of the Year Certificate Register is carried out in several steps. The employers carry out the first revision before the material is sent to the Norwegian Tax Administration. The Tax Administration then carries out controls both locally at the chief cashier's office and centrally at the Directorate of Taxes. The statistics are also controlled at Statistics Norway, where a quality check of the institutional sector and industry is the most extensive. The Tax Register is subject to a number of checks. Firstly, it is controlled whether the sums of all the different items add up with the main items in the tax return form. Secondly, it is checked whether extreme values are logical in relation to the rest of the form. Internal controls of consistence are conducted, for example whether income from the place of residence matches the value of the dwelling according to the tax return. External consistency checks are performed on similar material in Statistics Norway's own statistics on taxes for individual taxpayers.
The public dental health care
The counties are responsible for the public dental health care and for providing dental services for the inhabitants in the county, either by employees in the county or by dentists in private practice who have an agreement with the county.
Prioritised persons
Prioritised persons belong to one of the groups that have rights pursuant to the law on dental health. Group A consists of children aged 1-18 years and group B consists of mentally disabled persons above 18 years who do not live in an institution or receive home nursing. Group C1 consists of elderly, long-term ill and disabled persons living in institutions, and mentally disabled persons living in institutions. Elderly, long-term ill or disabled people must have lived in the institution for at least three months. Group C2 consists of elderly, long-term ill and disabled persons receiving home nursing. Included here are also mentally disabled people receiving home nursing. Group D consists of youth aged 19-20, with the exception of mentally disabled persons. Other groups that the county chooses to prioritise are referred to as group E. Examples of such patients are prison inmates and persons who receive treatment for substance abuse. Finally, group F consists of the rest of the adult population (not belonging to group A-E).
Under supervision by the public dental health care
The concept "under supervision by the public dental health care" is used about patients who belong to a prioritised group and who undergo a dental health care examination by a dentist or a dental nurse, receive dental treatment or training in preventive dental care, or are offered further examination or treatment. It follows that not all patients are treated/examined during one year.
dmft- DMFT
DMFT (Decayed, Missing, Filled Teeth) expresses the number of teeth that have or have had the need for treatment, and has been lost due to illness.
D signifies the number of teeth with caries, the number of teeth that needs to be repaired at the time of examination as a consequence of caries. M signifies the number of lost teeth as a consequence of disease. F signifies the number of teeth that have been treated as a consequence of caries, often called "teeth with caries experience".
DMFT (with capital letters) signifies permanent teeth, while dmft (with small letters) signifies milk teeth.
Employed
An employed person is defined as an individual who conducted at least one hour of paid work per 1 October or an individual who had such work, but who was temporarily absent because of illness, vacation, leave etc. The employment may be as employee or as self-employed. For self-employed people the register base is arranged so that the total number for employed is decided by the number of self-employed according to Statistics Norway's Labour Force Survey. Who is considered self-employed is partly determined by whether they have employees with an active employment per 1 October and partly by income data from the year prior to the reference year.
In some contexts it is necessary to choose one employment for people who are registered with several employments at the same time. This is necessary in order to enable the distribution of employees by industry and place of work (municipality). As a main rule, the employment with the highest number of working hours is used.
Characteristics of individuals
Age is defined as years of age at year-end.
Characteristics related to employment
A contracted man-year is estimated by measuring contracted working hours per week and comparing it to full-time working hours. This is conducted using working hours at the reference date 1 October, and assuming that this is representative for the whole year. Full-time is defined as 37.5 hours per week except for some professions, e.g. professions with shift work, where contracted full-time work is estimated to less than 37.5 hours per week. Contracted working hours is the number of working hours per week that the employee is obliged to work according to the contract of employment. Any absence from work caused by illness, holiday etc should not be deducted from the contracted working hours, and overtime is not taken into account. Information about working hours in the National Insurance Administration's Register of Employees is defined as expected contracted working hours and the working hours from 2001 is registered as exact time, compared with intervals (4-19 hours, 20-29 hours or 30 hours plus per week) previously. Information about the exact contracted working hours for employees for the statistical year 2000 and employees without an exact number of working hours for the years 2001 and 2002, is estimated by using the average for the groups that have exact working hours.
The self-employed do not have binding working hours. Instead, an estimated number for mean working hours taken from Statistic Norway's Labour Force Survey is used. The estimates are for different groups divided by sex and three different educational levels.
Sickness absence certified by a doctor: Information about sickness absence certified by a doctor is collected from the National Insurance Administration's register of sickness absence. The sickness absence for the fourth quarter of every year is used in the adjustment of the contracted man-years. The register of sickness absence only includes employees, but it is assumed that self-employed people have the same absence percentage as employees within each educational group.
So far, there are no statistics available on the number of conducted man-years.
Characteristics related to enterprises
The variables workplace and industry are taken from the Central Register of Establishments and Enterprises, and refer to the enterprise where the employee works. For self-employed people who are not tied to one establishment or enterprise, information about place of residence, education and self-employment activities of other family members is taken into account.
In the classification of counties, there is a separate group for Oslo.
The quality of the statistics depends on correct information being submitted by the respondents. The control routines mean that we can detect the most obvious errors (see point 3.6). In addition there may be errors in the work process, such as punching errors, code errors etc. The statistics on public dental health care are assumed to have few errors as the county dental officers are in contact with the individual dental practice that reports the information. Furthermore, the data go through thorough control and revision routines at Statistics Norway.
This is a full count.
This is a full count.
Register-based personnel information:
For people defined as employed and wage earners only on the basis of information from the End of the Year Certificate Register (approximately 10 per cent of all wage earners), the employment is not dated. For about half of this population, the information is collected from other administrative sources, which makes it possible to date the employment. For the remainder, the size of the wage is taken into account when evaluating whether the person is classified as employed. As a result, it can be uncertain whether the employment existed per 1 October.
Self-employed people are identified by information from the Tax Register. Because of the long production procedure, information from the previous year is used for the statistics. As a consequence, some people may incorrectly be classified as employed even though they terminated their employment in the previous year.
For people who are defined as employed and wage earners only on the basis of the End of the Year Certificate Register, the employment is linked to an enterprise. A method for identifying the enterprise in the best way possible has been developed. In cases where a person is employed in an establishment with several subsidiaries it is uncertain whether the employment is actually linked to the correct enterprise, and consequently, whether correct information about industry and workplace is collected.
For large establishments with several subsidiaries the distribution of employees in the Register of Employees may sometimes be insufficient. This is the case on municipal level and for distribution according to industry. Continuous controls are conducted on this type of employment, but it may take time to correct the errors in the registers, and small errors may not always be corrected. In general, these employments will be of less significance for statistics for the country as a whole, but may lead to important misconceptions on municipal level.
The figures for settled man-years are less reliable for the self-employed. This is because the registers contain no data on working hours on micro level. The information therefore needs to be supplemented with data on the number of hours worked on a highly aggregated level from the Labour Force Survey. These figures also contain sampling uncertainty. The use of such data means that the differences in working hours between individuals within the groups will disappear.
The statistics are similar to the statistics formerly published by the Norwegian Board of Health. The statistics are therefore comparable with statistics published in the annual reports for the public dental health care.
The use of register-based information for personnel data on private dental health care in 2002 means that these data are collected and defined in a different way than before. The figures are therefore not comparable with previous figures. This also applies to the use of register-based information in public dental health care from 2003. This means that the data are collected and defined in a different way than before and that the figures are not fully comparable with previous figures.
Oslo reported adult users of the emergency dental office as "adult paying clients" until 2003. This was changed from 2004, and there is a break in the time series for adult paying clients between 2003 and 2004. This also has implications on other calculations where figures for adult paying clients are used.
The Division for Labour Market Statistics in Statistics Norway publishes register-based employment statistics on all health and social work personnel. The information on personnel in private and public dental health care is based on the same data as the register-based employment statistics. For more information: http://www.ssb.no/english/subjects/06/01/hesospers_en/
http://www.ssb.no/english/subjects/00/00/20/kostra_en/
http://statbank.ssb.no//statistikkbanken/default_fr.asp?PLanguage=1
http://www.ssb.no/english/subjects/06/01/hesospers_en/
Unrevised KOSTRA figures are published on Statistics Norway's web site on 15 March. Preliminary figures are published on 15 June. The final figures are ready at the same time as the final figures for municipal health and care statistics. Statistics about dental health care have been presented as "Today's statistics" on the web site for dental health care. The figures are also available in StatBank Norway on ssb.no.
In addition to the figures published in Today's statistics and NOS Dental health, more data and more detailed tables can be commissioned. For more information, contact the Division for Health Statistics, telephone +47 21 09 45 00, or fax +47 21 09 44 40.
The storage of material collected via KOSTRA is done on municipal level. Data collected through administrative registers are stored on individual level, in addition to county level.