Children with Special Needs

Ulrika Hallberg, DrPH¿is an associate professor of public health at Malmö University, Faculty of Odontology, Department of Pediatric Dentistry. Ulrika is in essence a sociologist and received her doctorate in public health in 2003.¿She also works as a teaching material writer and has written several textbooks mainly about disabilities and mental illness. During the 1990s Ulrika trained as a social worker but has since her degree worked exclusively with research. Since the end of the 1990s, Ulrika has devoted herself to research and supervision in various aspects of functional impairments. She has been employed at the Department of Psychology in Gothenburg, the Nordic School of Public Health, Halmstad University, and now Malmö University. Ulrika has mainly used grounded theory in her research on different aspects of living with a disability, as the affected party or as a relative, and various aspects of living with mental illness, and has published many books on different aspects of living with a disability.¿ Gunilla Klingberg, DDS, PhD is professor in pediatric dentistry and adviser to the Vice-Chancellor at Malmö University, Sweden. She is also senior consultant and specialist in pediatric dentistry. In research, she has studied children with special needs, their dental and orofacial health and wellbeing, and how the children's needs are met by the dental health service. She has studied dental fear and anxiety, dental pain, socially vulnerable children, and young people with disabilities and used both quantitative and qualitative research methods. Using qualitative methods, primarily grounded theory, Gunilla, together with other researchers in a series of studies, has investigated how people with different disabilities and their relatives perceive oral health, need for dental care, and how they want to be cared for and treated by dental professionals. Special focus has been on people with rare diagnoses. To gain a broader understanding of oral health in people with disabilities, she has also investigated how healthcare and dental professionals perceive oral health and dental needs in patients with disabilities. Currently, studies using qualitative methods are carried out to study how children experience pain when they need to have teeth extracted, and how dental students and dentists understand and handle pain during dental treatment. Further studies aim to gain understanding about what children and adolescent and their parents or legal guardians experience as needs in dentistry and how they perceive oral health. Through studies of patient perspectives, the research group wants to create a basis for prioritizing both care and future research issues. Gunilla has previously published several scientific papers and textbooks.