Non-dental primary-care screening and hygiene-therapy referral conversion in Ugandan health centres: a multilevel analysis of point-of-entry effects

Ugandan health centres routinely record a point of entry for every outpatient contact, yet the relationship between that administrative gateway and the completion of dental hygiene therapy referrals has not been quantified. The indicator, 'Percentage receiving injection given by health care provider' (FP_SPUS_W_SPH), has a mean of 91.964 and a standard deviation of 12.468 across the fourteen country-survey observations, with Malawi at 60.90 and Kenya at 99.70. The analysis treats this distribution as a calibration benchmark for the plausible range of provider-mediated procedure completion in comparable primary-care systems, and it derives a set of testable propositions about how point-of-entry routing, screening capture and referral conversion interact. Referral conversion is not a property of patient motivation alone but a function of the entry point through which the patient first encounters the health system, and it specifies the multilevel design that would be required to estimate that effect in Ugandan health centres.