 My name is Tony Barnett, I'm Chief Investigator with the Centre for Research Excellence in Primary Oral Health Care. We're interested in how to improve oral health and oral health services, specifically my role is to look at rural oral health. We were trying to investigate why oral health was poor in the bush, why people presented to health care facilities with oral health problems, rather than for maintenance, oral health maintenance and prevention of oral health disease, and we were wondering what we could do about it, how we could improve oral health in country areas. We wrote to the Chief Dentists of a number of states and asked them to identify some towns in rural and remote areas of Australia where there wasn't a dentist. And our plan was to go to those towns and talk to primary care providers, so nurses, GPs, pharmacists, the local hospitals, to see if oral health was a problem, if they were seeing people with oral health issues and how they were managing those, and if they had ideas about how the problem of oral health could be better remedied or solved in the bush. We found that oral health was a big problem. People in many rural towns were presenting to non-dental health practitioners with oral health problems, abscesses, toothache. There were issues that were a burden to the general health system. This was largely due to the lack of in situ or in place dental services, so people when they had an oral health problem were going to their primary care provider, the pharmacist or the GP or the emergency department in hospitals. It was a big problem. We found that the primary care providers were very interested in oral health. They didn't have sufficient knowledge to deal with oral health problems, therefore they were very keen on continuing education in small doses that was very practical. A number of the practitioners sought out continuing education programs. Some of the GPs visited dentists to learn more about oral health and what dentists actually did. We think that's improved their practice and their management of presentations. All the practitioners were terribly keen on prevention of oral health disease. They were looking at primary care strategies that involved collective actions rather than actions primarily by the dentist or an oral health therapist. They were looking at community-based actions that would help prevent oral health disease and maintain good oral health. Things like oral health hygiene, regular brushing, fluoridation of water, healthy diets, not smoking. These general measures they saw as integral and very important to good oral health.