Improving dental care for our kids

The Child Dental Benefits Schedule (CDBS) provides much needed dental care to around 50% of Australian children. However, several reviews of the scheme have highlighted key areas that need to be fixed especially accessing CDBS funding for dental treatment provided under general anaesthetic. Since this is presently excluded, and the public dental system is under-resourced, many children are forced to wait in pain for this dental treatment.

There is an urgent need to implement the recommendations made in the Report on the Fifth Review of the Dental Benefits Act 2008. In particular, for CDBS to be expanded to include treatment in a hospital or a day procedure centre. There is also a requirement to review the Diagnosis Related Group for dental procedures to incorporate complexity measures that better reflect the range of services provided in collaboration with representatives from specialist dentist.

Act now by writing an email to your local Member of Parliament.

Use the map below to find your electorate and and details of your local Member of Parliament and candidates in the upcoming election. Send them an email, engage with them on social media and raise awareness of this issue.

Find your electorate on the map.

Click on the links to find out more about your local candidate.
Click on the social media links to engage with your MP. Not all politicians have active social media accounts and some links will be to the generic party account. You can use these free social media tiles here to share online.
Click on the ‘Send email’ link to send an email with automatically generated text. Feel free to modify the text, particularly if you have a personal story to share.

The email will send a blind copy to our campaign to allow us to monitor engagement. You can delete the email if you would prefer to remain anonymous.

More candidates will be added once they have been announced.

Click here to open map in new screen.

If you don’t know your electorate, you can find it here at the Australian Electoral Commission.