By Ralph Fuccillo, MA, President, DentaQuest Foundation
As Dr. Luther
mentioned in his post last week, February is National Children's Dental Health
Month. I’d like to highlight an oral health program for children that is seeing
some exciting results, which could serve as a leading best practice when it
comes to prioritizing our kids’ oral health. In this collaboration between
Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, called Building
Successful Collaborative State Oral Health Consortiums, we are addressing
oral health disparities and promoting access to care for children.
Most infants
and one year-olds in the U.S. have seen a physician, but a mere 2 percent have
ever visited a dentist. Surprising to many, children who wait until age two or
three to see a dentist actually experience more dental issues than those who
visit a dentist on their first birthday, or when the first tooth comes in, as
recommended by the American Dental Association. In an effort to change this
trend, the DentaQuest Foundation and Head Start Association worked together to
encourage early childhood oral health care.
Head Start offers
a comprehensive preschool program to low-income children, and also provides
families with relevant health information and ensures that children in the
program receive regular physical and oral health check-ups.
Through a grant
from the DentaQuest Foundation, the Massachusetts and Pennsylvania Head Start
Associations created a three-pronged approach to encourage early childhood care
for oral health, which includes:
- Developing relationships with key stakeholders including state oral health and public health organizations;
- Promoting oral health education; and
- Increasing access to oral care.
Now in the
third and final year of our initiative, our Head Start partners have experienced
promising successes to share in both states.
The Pennsylvania
Head Start Association has done a great job of getting the word out about early
childhood care. They developed effective oral health coalitions through
multiple forums, which had more than 175 participants. Additionally, they've trained
more than 250 individuals in the “Cavity Free Kids” curriculum, which helps
children practice good oral health habits. Of these trained individuals, many
are teachers, infant/toddler specialists, family advocates and more.
Furthermore, to date, more than 335 Pennsylvania dentists have been educated on
the importance of treating one year-old children.
The
Massachusetts Head Start efforts successfully connected children to dentists,
giving them a “dental home”. At the start of the initiative, only 19 percent of
dentists said they treated children age one or younger. Massachusetts Head
Start implemented a program called “Connect the Dots”, to help dentists and
primary care doctors understand the importance of starting a dental home at an
early age. At the end of the first two years of the initiative, the number of
dentists in Massachusetts reporting the treatment of children at age one grew
from 19 percent to almost 40 percent.
We're proud of
our work with the Massachusetts and Pennsylvania Head Start Associations, but
we still have more work to do if we want to meet our national goal of 75
percent of children to reach age five cavity-free. From a national perspective,
Head Start programs offer a great opportunity to reach our youngest children at
a critical time in their development. We are looking at the lessons learned
from the work done in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, and sharing these tactics
with our community partners across the U.S. By training the next generation on
best practices, we are mobilizing communities to be sure all children receive
the dental care they need, when they need it.
For more
information on Head Start, visit http://www.nhsa.org/ (National Head Start Association) and https://eclkc.ohs.acf.hhs.gov/hslc (the Office of Head Start’s Early
Childhood Learning and Knowledge Center).