About IDA

Reduce disease and disability. Update the public and dental professionals on ways to reduce the burden of oral disease through education, behavioural change, risk reduction, early diagnosis and disease prevention management. Set criteria and strong foundations for evaluating the scientific evidence and promoting effective interventions.

Improve oral health care access. Health disparities are commonly associated with populations whose access to health care services is extremely poor due to poverty, limited education or language skills, geographic isolation, age, gender, disability, or an existing medical condition. Establish close working relationships so that strategies tailored to the varying and continuing health needs can be developed.

Enhance health promotion and health literacy. To encourage healthier lifestyles and increase interventions for prevention or early detection of disease by changing the environment (the places where people work, play, learn or live).

Policies and programmes concerning tobacco cessation, dietary choices, wearing protective gear for sports and other lifestyle related efforts not only will benefit oral health, but are natural ways to integrate oral health promotion with promotion of general health and well-being.

Many Indians do not realize the importance of oral health and preventive measures that can be taken before a situation deteriorates affecting their oral health. Symptoms may not be recognized and treatment to overcome gets neglected thus oral health care programmes aim to:

Identify and reduce disease and disability

• Implement science-based interventions appropriate for individuals and communities.
• Enhance oral health-related content in health professions school curricula, residencies and continuing education programmes, by incorporating new findings on diagnosis, treatment and prevention of oral diseases and disorders.
• Build and support epidemiologic and surveillance databases at national, state, and local levels to identify patterns of disease and populations at risk.
• Data are needed on oral health status, disease and health services utilization and expenditures, sorted by demographic variables for various populations. Surveys should document baseline status, monitor progress and measure health outcomes.
• Determine, at community or population levels, oral health care needs and system requirements, including appropriate reimbursement for services, facility and personnel needs, and mechanisms of referral.
• Encourage partnerships among research, provider, and educational communities in activities, such as organizing workshops and conferences, to develop ways to meet the education, research, and service needs of patients who need special care and their families.

Improve access to oral health care

• Promote and apply programmes that have demonstrated effective improvement in access to care.
• Create an active and up-to-date database of these programmes.
• Explore policy changes that can improve provider participation in public health insurance programmes and enhance patient access to care.
• Remove barriers to the use of services by simplifying forms, letting individuals know when and how to obtain services and providing transportation and child care as needed.
• Assist low-income patients in arranging and keeping oral health appointments.
• Facilitate health insurance benefits for diseases and disorders affecting craniofacial, oral, and dental tissues, including genetic diseases such as the ectodermal dysplasias, congenital anomalies such as clefting syndromes, autoimmune diseases such as Sjögren’s syndrome, and chronic orofacial pain conditions such as temporomandibular disorders.
• Ensure an adequate number and distribution of culturally competent providers to meet the needs of individuals and groups, particularly in health-care shortage areas.
• Make optimal use of oral health and other health care providers in improving access to oral health care.
• Energize and empower the public to implement solutions to meet their oral health care needs.
• Develop integrated and comprehensive care programmes that include oral health care and increase the number and types of settings in which oral health services are provided.

Advances in health depend on biomedical and behavioral research aimed at understanding the causes and pathological processes of diseases. This can lead to interventions that will improve prevention, diagnosis and treatment. Too many people outside the oral health community are uninformed about, misinformed about or simply not interested in oral health. Such lack of understanding and indifference may explain why community programmes fall short of full implementation, even though the scientific evidence for their effectiveness has been known for some time.

Oral health research must also pursue research on chronic oral infections associated with heart and lung disease, diabetes, and premature low birth-weight babies.

Specifically there is a need to:

• Enhance applied research (clinical and population-based studies, demonstration projects, health services research) to improve oral health and prevent disease.
• Expand intervention studies aimed at preventing and managing oral infections and complex diseases, including new approaches to prevent dental caries and periodontal diseases.
• Intensify population-based studies aimed at the prevention of oral cancer and oral-facial trauma.
• Conduct studies to elucidate potential underlying mechanisms and determine any causal associations between oral infections and systemic conditions. If associations are demonstrated, test interventions to prevent or lower risk of complications.
• Develop diagnostic markers for disease susceptibility and progression of oral diseases.
• Develop and test diagnostic codes for oral diseases that can be used in research and in practice.
• Develop reliable and valid measures of patients’ oral health outcomes for use in programmes and in practice.
• Support research on the effectiveness of community-based and clinical interventions.
• Facilitate collaborations among health professional schools, state health programs, patient groups, professional associations, private practitioners, industries, and communities to support the conduct of clinical and community-based research as well as accelerate science transfer.

Accelerate the effective transfer of science into public health and private practice

• Promote effective disease prevention measures that are underutilized.
• Routinely transfer oral health research findings to health professional school curricula and continuing education programmes and incorporate appropriate curricula from other health professions- medical, nursing, pharmacy and social work--into dental education.
• Communicate research findings to the public, clearly describing behaviours and actions that promote health and well-being.
• Explore ways to accelerate the transfer of research findings into delivery systems, including appropriate changes in reimbursement for care.
• Routinely evaluate the scientific evidence and update care recommendations.

Meet patient needs. The patient pool of any health care provider tends to mirror the provider’s own racial and ethnic background. As such, the provider can play a catalytic role as a community spokesperson, addressing key health problems and service needs .

While the number of women engaged in the health professions is increasing, the number of underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities is decreasing and remains limited. Specific racial and ethnic groups are underrepresented in the active dental profession compared to their representation in the general population:

Efforts require full community participation, mentorship and creative outreach.

Enhance oral health workforce capacity.

Dental school recruitment programmes offer incentives to students who may want to return to practice in rural areas and inner cities are in a prime position to act. Through these programmes dental schools increase the diversity of the oral health workforce. To effect change in oral health workforce capacity, more training and recruitment efforts are needed. The lack of personnel with oral health expertise at all levels in public health programmes remains a serious problem, as does the projected unmet oral health faculty and researcher needs.

Further, all health care professionals, whether trained at privately or publicly supported medical, dental, or allied health professional schools, need to be enlisted in local efforts to eliminate health disparities.

These activities could include participating in part-time service in community clinics or in health care shortage areas, assisting in community-health assessment activities, participating in school-based disease prevention efforts and volunteering in health-promotion and disease-prevention efforts such as tobacco cessation programmes.

Efforts are needed to:

• Change the racial and ethnic composition of the workforce to meet patient and community needs
• Document the outcomes of existing efforts to diversify the workforce in practice, education, and research.
• Develop ways to expand and build upon successful recruitment and retention programmes.
• Create and support programs that inform and encourage individuals to pursue health and science career options in high school and during graduate years.

Ensure a sufficient workforce pool to meet health care needs by

• Expand scholarships and loan repayment efforts at all levels.
• Specify and identify resources for conducting outreach and recruitment.
• Develop mentoring programmes to ensure retention of individuals who have been successfully recruited into oral health careers.
• Facilitate collaborations among professional, government, academic, industry, community organizations and other institutions that are addressing the needs of the oral health workforce.
• Provide training in communication skills and cultural competence to health care providers and students.

Secure an adequate and flexible workforce by:

• Assess the existing capacity and distribution of the oral health workforce.
• Study how to extend or expand workforce capacity and productivity to address oral health in health care shortage areas.
• Work to ensure oral health expertise is available to health departments and to government programmes.

The private sector and public sector each has unique characteristics and strengths. Linking the two can result in a creative synergy capitalizing on the talent and resources of each partner. In addition, efforts are needed within each sector to increase the capacity for programme development, for building partnerships, and for leveraging programmes.

A sustained effort is needed right now to build the nation’s oral health infrastructure to ensure that all sectors of society--the public, private practitioners, and government personnel--have sufficient knowledge, expertise, and resources to design, implement and monitor oral health programmes. Leadership for successfully directing and guiding public agency oral health units is essential. Further, incentives must be in place for partnerships to form and flourish. Disease prevention and health promotion campaigns and programmes that affect oral and general health-- such as tobacco control, diet counseling, health education aimed at pregnant women and new mothers and support for use of oral facial protection for sports—can benefit from collaborations among public health and health care practicing communities.

Programmes require the combined efforts of social service, education and health care services at state and local levels. Most importantly, the public in the form of voluntary organizations, community groups, or as individuals, must be included in any partnership that addresses oral and general health.

Successful partnering at all levels of society will require efforts to:

• Strengthen the networking capacity of individuals and communities to address their oral health needs.
• Build and nurture broad-based coalitions that incorporate views and expertise of all stakeholders and that are tailored to specific populations, conditions or programmes.
• Strengthen collaborations among dental, medical, and public health communities for research, education, care delivery, and policy development.
• Develop partnerships that are community-based, cross-disciplinary, and culturally sensitive.
• Work with the Partnership Network and other coalitions to address the four actions previously described: change perceptions, overcome barriers, build a balanced science base, and increase oral health workforce diversity, capacity, and flexibility.

This action plan will serve as a blueprint, one that can be a tool for enlisting collaborators and partners. Building this plan into existing health programmes will maximize the integration of oral health into general health programmes—not only by incorporating the expertise of multidisciplinary professional teams, but also allowing the plan to benefit from economies of scale by adding on to existing facilities, utilizing existing data and management systems and serve the public.