[Primary dental healthcare in Brazil: the work process of oral health teams].

Ensuring access to dental care services requires the development of healthsurveillance practices to ensure comprehensive health care. The objective of this study was toinvestigate the association between social and economic indicators of Brazilian municipalities, work process characteristics, and performance of a list of curative dental procedures by oral health teams. It involved an exploratory, cross-sectional study withmulticenter data collection from 11,374 oral health teams assessed by the National Program for Improvement of Access to and Quality of Primary Healthcare. Multilevel Poisson regression was used to obtain the prevalence of curative dental procedures, which was 69.51%. The social/economic and work variables that remained associated with the outcome included municipalities in which the proportion of primary care-sensitive admissions was below 28% and that of tooth extractions below 8%; and oral health teams classified as type II (including oral health assistant and technician) that had different materials available and better work processes. This multilevel analysis, which took into consideration the performance of curative dental care in Brazil, reveals a worrying oral healthcare scenario.