Intouch Public Health

Tan Minh Nguyen, Christina Mati, Sneha Sethi, Carrie Wong, and Mary O’Loughlin

Oral health is foundational to overall health and wellbeing. Australians take considerable pride in realising universal health coverage through Medicare, yet funding of essential oral healthcare remains largely excluded. Good oral health care involves more than ‘seeing the dentist’, yet oral health policy supported by successive Australian governments has focused on a narrow range of subsidised dental services for a limited range of population groups.

Oral health policy rarely features as an Australian public health priority, despite agreement on its importance. By 2026, little progress has been made on the expired National Oral Health Plan 2014-2025 (the Plan), including the unfulfilled recommendation to appoint a Commonwealth Chief Oral Health Officer for national clinical leadership in oral health. The Public Health Association of Australia (PHAA) asserts three key policy positions related to oral health:

• A Commonwealth Chief Oral Health Officer should be appointed to provide national clinical leadership for oral health.
• The Australian Government should implement a roadmap towards universal access to essential oral healthcare within Medicare.
• The Australian Government should implement and evaluate Australia’s National Oral Health Plan

Funding for essential oral healthcare for all Australians should be regarded as a fundamental human right to health, rather than merely an aspirational goal. The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes (AuSSA) explores social attitudes, beliefs and opinions of Australians.

In 2026, the PHAA Oral Health and Primary Health Care Special Interest Groups posed a question to AuSSA respondents: ‘Currently there is limited government funding in Australia for essential dental services. To what extent are you in favour of or against the government primarily funding essential dental care services for all Australians?’

Initial findings from the first and second waves (a total of four waves) on the 2026 AuSSA survey (n=580) confirmed that at 82% of Australians were in favour of government primarily funding essential dental care services for all Australians.

Without a current National Oral Health Plan, on 3 September, 2026, Health Ministers agreed to establish the National Oral Health and Dental Reform Senior Officials Group to progress national priorities on oral health reform. The Group should first be tasked to define “What is essential oral healthcare for Australia?”, including considerations of safety, effectiveness and cost-effectiveness. Next, the roadmap for universal access to essential oral healthcare should be detailed, with reference to stable financing mechanisms, service delivery within primary healthcare, a diversified health workforce, and regulatory actions on commercial determinants.

With strong community support, meaningful oral health policy reforms require the collective efforts of all public health practitioners to recognise and prioritise oral health as a critical public health imperative. We cannot simply accept and rely on governments or those representing commercial interests of health professional associations to do the work for us. Expertise from qualified dental practitioners with public health expertise is integral, however prioritising oral health requires all public health practitioners, beyond those with a clinical oral health and dentistry expertise, to advocate for strengthening oral health policy. Like other non-communicable diseases having deeper prominence in the public health discourse, oral health must be elevated as a health priority by public health advocates.

Acknowledgements

Funding to sponsor the survey question reported in this article was supported by the Public Health Association of Australia Oral Health and Primary Health Care Special Interest Groups.

Tan Minh Nguyen, Christina Mati, and Sneha Sethi are members of the Public Health Association’s Oral Health Special Interest Group (SIG), and Carrie Wong and Dr Mary O’Loughlin belong to the Primary Health Care SIG.