Disentangling a web of causation: An ethnographic study of interlinked patient barriers to planned dental visiting, and strategies to overcome them

Abstract

Barriers to planned dental visiting are complex, multi-layered and change over time, constituting a 'web of causation'. This adds a novel perspective to the literature on barriers to dental visiting, and requires that researchers, dental practitioners and policy makers remain open to barriers' interlinked effects, changes in primacy among individual patients' barriers, and their accumulation over time to better support uptake of planned dental visiting.