Measures of dental fear treatment need should be used to determine the need for dental treatment based on potential dental care impairment, potential for adverse effect on oral health and deviation from normal dental fear levels determined for the community. The instrument should be used for planning treatment for individual patients and should also be valuable for community based studies when there is a need to plan for resource allocation to priority groups.

Presently, there are no existing measures specifically focusing on measuring treatment needs in an individual or a population. Identification of treatment needs for individuals are oftentimes based on subjective assessment by dentists. Such deductions are made from expressed behaviours by the child.

Ideally, the measure should not summarise scores as a summary would imply that the different items highlighted in the measure affect the need for treatment. These factors then become confounding.

There is presently no report discussing the community treatment need for dental fear based on scientific evaluation processes. No tools presently that can do this. A tool that may be able to identify the need for treatment of dental fear should be able to decipher that the traits present would predispose the child to increased risk of socio-psychological disturbances. Such a tool may need to have objective methods of determining this so as to enhance uniformity in the application of the measure.