The Lisbon Paediatric Dental Service (SOL) of the Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Lisboa celebrated its fifth anniversary last week, having already carried out more than 141,000 free consultations with children and young people of 71 nationalities and fitted 2,430 orthodontic braces.
Created in 2019 by Santa Casa as a complementary response to the National Health Service, SOL currently has 19,553 users and is an unprecedented facility in Portugal that provides oral health care, free of charge for families, to all children and young people up to the age of 18 living in the Municipality of Lisbon, regardless of their socioeconomic status or nationality. One of its main aims is to improve the oral health of babies, children and teenagers in Lisbon, through consultations that include orthodontics, endodontics, oral surgery, dentistry and oral hygiene.
SOL also has a research component, producing new knowledge and scientific approaches in the field of oral health. To date, it has worked on 40 research projects, including ‘Prevalence of Sleep Bruxism Reported by Parents/Caregivers in a Portuguese Paediatric Dentistry Service: A Retrospective Study’, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in 2022, and the book ‘Cadernos Técnicos: Saúde Oral Infantil’, which brings together several articles by the Service’s various clinicians.
Image by MARCIO GUIMARAES by Pixabay
