Academic detailing in dental care

The research in this thesis was aimed at optimising oral healthcare in Europe by stimulating preventive, patient-centred and evidence-based oral healthcare. AD was used together with feedback information to intrinsically motivate GDPs to improve their care delivery. To accomplish this, the first objective was to establish measures of oral healthcare to obtain routine data on oral healthcare delivery and oral health outcomes for feedback provision. A second objective was to evaluate whether reliable and valid data can be collected from the measures of oral healthcare and whether the data can be presented in a useful way to provide feedback to GDPs. The main aim was to evaluate whether AD together with feedback information is a feasible, acceptable and useful approach to intrinsically motivate GDPs to re-orientate their clinical practice towards preventive, patient-centred and evidence-based oral healthcare. In addition, this thesis explored the presence of different perspectives on oral healthcare amongst GDPs, as this might provide relevant information for such re-orientation of oral healthcare.