Similar debates are breaking out in the world of dentistry, where dental and oral health therapists, who work with children and adolescents, want the right to practice on adult patients.

The Federal Government issued a report last week by the National Advisory Council on Dental Health on options for ensuring all Australians have access to dental care.

The council suggested that consideration be given to expanding the scope of practice of oral health and dental therapists and dental hygienists so that they could provide services for broader population groups and relieve time pressures on dentists.

Australian Dental and Oral Health Therapists' Association president Julie Barker said it made sense for members of her profession to be able to treat adults, but this was being resisted by the Australian Dental Association.

''It seems that ADA and various politicians are happy for us to treat the children but the minute we say the skills for filling a tooth are the same regardless of whether you're treating an adult or a child, they start to get concerned that we're stepping outside our boundary, that we're not going to be as easy to contain,'' Ms Barker said.

Oral health therapists have bachelor-level degrees and are mostly employed in the public sector, although an increasing number work in private practice. They provide routine treatment such as dental examinations and diagnosis, cleaning, scaling and polishing teeth, filling cavities and extracting teeth under local anaesthetic.

In some states they work with young people up to the age of 25, although in others the age limit is 18.

Ms Barker said dental and oral health therapists were scrupulous about referring more complex cases to dentists.

''We're focussing on the routine stuff. We don't do root canals and we don't do crown and bridgework or dentures. All that high-end complicated stuff is left up to the dentists,'' she said.

Ms Barker said expanding the scope of therapists' practice could help meet unmet needs in rural and remote areas which were serviced by therapists and fly-in, fly-out dentists.

Australian Dental Association president Shane Fryer said dental and oral health therapists' expertise was in children's dental care but they were not trained to detect complex problems in adult teeth, particularly those suffered by people who had not visited a dentist for several years.

''Their current education is not geared towards the complexities of adult dental care. Their expertise is in children,'' Dr Fryer said.

''The people who haven't been to the dentist for a long time can have what we describe as mutilated dentition. So, they've got a lot of caries, a lot of periodontal disease, they require complex care. But the therapists are experts at treating children, there's no question about that.''