Explore the vast range of titles available.

COVID-19 has challenged the public dental workforce in their ability to continue providing routine oral health care services. To mitigate the risk of COVID-19 transmission to staff and patients, Teledentistry was implemented in many parts of the world, mainly to provide remote consultations, undertake triage, and offer preventive educational sessions. The aim of this paper is to describe Dental Health Services Victoria’s (DHSV) patient-initiated Teledentistry model of care implemented during peak COVID transmission in Victoria. The Teledentistry model supported patient-centered care involving active collaboration and shared decision making between patients, families, and clinicians in designing and managing remote care plans. DHSV’s eligible patient cohort includes disadvantaged population groups with greater oral health needs. Strong emphasis was placed on the simplicity and user friendliness of the Telehealth platform, as well as the support for patients with low technology literacy. Consumers and dental workforce were consulted and modifications to the use of language and services were undertaken before the launch. A total of 2492 patients accessed Telehealth services between May 2020 and April 2021. Approximately 39% of patients were born in a country other than Australia. A total of 489 patient-reported experience measures (PREMs) were received. Patients agreed or strongly agreed that the care they received met their needs (87%); they received answers to their questions (89%); they left their visit knowing what is next (87%); they felt they were taken care of during their visit (90%); and they felt involved in their treatment (89%). Teledentistry enabled patients to initiate access to care and consult with dental workforce remotely and safely during peak pandemic.

This article argues that, as wage work has become more precarious, the importance of the household in the livelihood strategies of precarious South African workers has increased. The shifting importance of the household in relation to the workplace in the economic lives of workers has implications for the political strategies that these workers adopt. The article draws on data from a national household survey combined with insights from the author's fieldwork across rural and urban sites in South Africa. It contributes to the growing literature on the politics of precarious work in the global South.

To grasp what might exist beyond neoliberalism, we need to rethink the history of development before neoliberalism. This article makes two arguments. First, for poorer countries, processes of commodification which are highlighted as evidence of neoliberalism often predate the neoliberal era. Third World development policies tended to make social and economic life more precarious as a corollary to capital accumulation before neoliberalism as an ideology took hold. Second, the intense theoretical and discursive focus on neoliberalism has obscured a tangible shift towards de-commodification in much of the global South. The most salient examples today are state-led social assistance programs that have been implemented across the former Third World. These emerged not out of technocratic fixes from above but often out of political and social struggles from below. The rise and spread of these programs are not only in stark contrast to popular conceptions of a neoliberal reinforcement, but are also specifically targeted at social strata whose precarity commonly originated in developmental policies before the neoliberal era. Utilizing a database of 183 active flagship social assistance programs in 84 developing countries, we present macro-level quantitative evidence of the rise and spread of social protection policies over the past two decades in the global South. We then detail these programs for four middle-income countries—China, Brazil, India, and South Africa. To those who lament that the 2008 crisis has produced no Polanyian double movement, we argue that these state-driven social assistance policies are such a mechanism.

The dispossession of agricultural producers from the land has long been considered a condition of successful capitalist development. The main contention of this paper is that such dispossession has in fact become the source of major developmental handicaps for at least some and possibly many countries of the global South. We develop our argument by focusing on the South(ern) African experience as a paradigmatic outlier case of accumulation by dispossession—that is, as one of its extreme instances capable of highlighting in almost ideo-typical fashion its nature and limits. After reconstructing interpretations of capitalist development in Southern Africa that in the early 1970s established the region as a paradigm of accumulation by dispossession, we discuss how useful these interpretations are for understanding the more recent developmental trajectory of South Africa. We then suggest ways in which these interpretations from the 1970s should be reformulated in light of subsequent developments. We conclude by briefly examining the theoretical and policy implications of the analysis.

The landmark 2021 Resolution on Oral Health by the 74th World Health Assembly has elevated the importance of oral health into the global health policy agenda. This has led to the development and adoption of the World Health Organization (WHO) Global Strategy on Oral Health in 2022. It acknowledged the need to integrate oral health as part of universal health coverage (UHC), which is supported by national clinical leadership for oral health. Although Australia is a signatory WHO member state, it is yet to appoint a Commonwealth Chief Dental Officer to provide national clinical leadership. This commentary provides a background on the current issues on population oral health in Australia, an insight into the Australian oral healthcare system, and explores some of the challenges and learnings related to previous Commonwealth dental programs. This paper highlights why expertise in dental public health is required to steer national oral health policy that is focused on prevention and early intervention. A population oral health approach for UHC should be informed by evidence, prioritise and address oral health inequities, and be co-ordinated by national clinical leadership for oral health.

The landmark 2021 Resolution on Oral Health by the 74th World Health Assembly has elevated the importance of oral health into the global health policy agenda. This has led to the development and adoption of the World Health Organization (WHO) Global Strategy on Oral Health in 2022. It acknowledged the need to integrate oral health as part of universal health coverage (UHC), which is supported by national clinical leadership for oral health. Although Australia is a signatory WHO member state, it is yet to appoint a Commonwealth Chief Dental Officer to provide national clinical leadership. This commentary provides a background on the current issues on population oral health in Australia, an insight into the Australian oral healthcare system, and explores some of the challenges and learnings related to previous Commonwealth dental programs. This paper highlights why expertise in dental public health is required to steer national oral health policy that is focused on prevention and early intervention. A population oral health approach for UHC should be informed by evidence, prioritise and address oral health inequities, and be co-ordinated by national clinical leadership for oral health.

The 2021 Resolution on Oral Health by the 74th World Health Assembly supports an important health policy direction: inclusion of oral health in universal health coverage. Many healthcare systems worldwide have not yet addressed oral diseases effectively. The adoption of value-based healthcare (VBHC) reorients health services towards outcomes. Evidence indicates that VBHC initiatives are improving health outcomes, client experiences of healthcare, and reducing costs to healthcare systems. No comprehensive VBHC approach has been applied to the oral health context. Dental Health Services Victoria (DHSV), an Australian state government entity, commenced a VBHC agenda in 2016 and is continuing its efforts in oral healthcare reform. This paper explores a VBHC case study showing promise for achieving universal health coverage that includes oral health. DHSV applied the VBHC due to its flexibility in scope, consideration of a health workforce with a mix of skills, and alternative funding models other than fee-for-service.

The South African labor movement has a proud history of effective action and enjoys a level of political influence that would make it the envy of unions around the world. Yet, over the past few decades South African workers have experienced the decline of formal wage labor as acutely as any in the world. Moreover, despite their political position, unions have been unable to incorporate the growing sections of informally employed and unemployed workers in the country. The predominant interpretation among scholars, activists, and government officials is that South Africa's contemporary class structure is increasingly polarized between an organized elite minority and the unorganized majority of workers. This \"polarization thesis\" has led scholars to argue that contemporary pro-poor development policy in South Africa should aim to undermine the strength of the privileged minority in order to extend employment to the excluded majority. Those scholars who remain sympathetic to labor stress the need for unions to focus on organizing informal workers in order to broaden their base, but efforts to do so have met with very little success. Drawing on national level survey data and interviews conducted by the author in 2010 and 2011, this dissertation argues that, contrary to the polarization thesis, a broad cross-section of South African workers live in households that draw on livelihood strategies that involve pooling income across the divides of employed-unemployed, formal-informal, and organized-unorganized. These findings, consistent with the work of a number of recent theorists, suggest that development policies in the contemporary period should be based on improving livelihoods rather than simply pursuing growth. For unions, the presence of livelihood issues which are important to the well-being of both organized and unorganized workers points towards a strategy of coalition building that moves beyond the thus far unsuccessful focus on workplace-based organizing. The introduction and conclusion of the dissertation tie the South African case to the debate about polarization in the broader literature on global class structure.