The summary statistics presented here are based on 2022 data from the Board of Dental Examiners of Alabama. Much of the data are self-reported and so may not be entirely accurate. We give statistics for Alabama dentists (that is, dentists with an active Alabama dental license who practice in the state), and we break down the data according to the basic dichotomy of rural versus urban dentists.
The classification of a dentist as rural or urban is based on the dentist's primary practice community, as classified by the US Cenus Bureau. Alabama has 12 urbanized areas (and the Pensacola, Florida urbanized area has a small overlap with Alabama). A dentist who practices in a community that falls into an urbanized area is classified as urban; otherwise he/she is classified as rural.
Our data are displayed in the form of interactive maps and interactive tables. The maps generally have point or area layers that can be added or removed with the layer control on the map. The user can zoom in and out of a map and move about in the usual way. Zooming in reveals additional features such as small towns and then streets and roads. A click on the home button returns the map to its origional location and scale. The zoom-to-area button allows the user to zoom to a selected rectangular area of the map. Clicking on an object in a layer shows summary data for that object.
The interactive tables can be sorted by any field, by clicking on the header for that field. The buttons at the top allow the table data to be copied to the clipboard, in tab-separated text format, printed, or downloaded in various formats (tab-separated text, Excel, or PDF). With the search bar, the table can be filtered according to a text string.
In the interactive tables you can click on a row to select an object (community, county, PCSA) and see the object highlighted in the map. You can select as many rows as you wish. Click on a selected row again to de-select and remove the highlighting in the map.
The Office for Family Health Education and Research provides an infrastructure where opportunities for research in education, policy, clinical medicine and other scholarly works in primary care can flourish. The office produces and disseminates practical clinical information to primary care physicians, coordinates and conducts studies that deal with the health care education of primary care physicians and patients, as well as the broader issues of state health policy, health access and health manpower.