ABSTRACT
To successfully tackle inequity in oral health and access to dental care, it is important to understand how dentists perceive their duty to care for others. The scope of concern for others can be studied through the concepts of moral inclusion, moral community and moral inclusiveness. Moral inclusion is the application of moral values, rules and considerations of fairness towards others. Moral community is the group(s) of people to whom one applies moral inclusion. Moral inclusiveness is the breadth of one’s moral community, and may range from narrow, if one is only concerned for family and friends, to broad, if one is concerned for all of society. To assess these parameters among dentists, a mail survey was sent to 3,201 randomly selected dentists in the Province of Ontario, Canada’s most populous province and the largest dental care market. Moral inclusiveness was measured using a ‘moral community score’, composed of the sum of the responses to a question about the dentist’s duty to care for different social groups. Dentists’ views on moral inclusiveness were measured by their agreement with Likert-type scale questions. While the majority of dentists did agree with morally inclusive views, they also showed bias against specific patient groups. Further, dentists’ demographic and practice characteristics and business considerations were related to having a broad moral community. We contend that moral inclusiveness should be an integral part of dentists’ professionalism, and that understanding the moral inclusiveness of dentists is important to reducing oral health-related inequity.
