Following a recent policy roundtable debate in Westminster, Pam Whelan discusses the future of Dental Plans and getting oral healthcare awareness higher up company agendas.
A wide range of health policy areas, government, think tanks, academia and dentistry journals have been trying to strengthen oral health messages in the wider public health agenda for many years.
This is no surprise when you take into account the increasing evidence which supports the link between poor oral healthcare and more serious illnesses including cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
A policy roundtable debate in Westminster recently to explore this area in more detail and to throw light on the future of Dental Plans in the UK. The roundtable, ‘Prevention and Early Intervention: Realising Dentistry's potential to meet Britain's Chronic Disease Challenge' was designed to discuss:
- The value dentistry can add to the early intervention, prevention and public health agenda
- The advantages of an increasingly sophisticated integration of oral and general health promotion
How dentists are innovating in early intervention and prevention and how to enhance this
- The ‘traffic light' treatment plan in new dental strategies and broader health triggers
- Views on what more can be achieved and how practically to fulfil that goal.
Links to chronic disease
Research suggests that poor oral health is a strong indicator of other, often chronic, health problems in adults with significant links between inflammation of the gums and the effect this has on issues such as heart attack and stroke to name but a few.
Periodontitis (gum disease) is a significant issue that some 43% of adults suffer from in the UK and it is the most common, highly prevalent, inflammatory disease in adults.
This is not only causing a significant cost to the taxpayer, but is also completely avoidable with the proper oral healthcare, signifying the importance of the role dentists can play in preventive healthcare.
Dental professionals are in a unique situation, as they see ‘healthy' patients every single day for routine dental care and treatment. Doctors, on the other hand, will only see patients with a specific problem or illness.
This gives dentists the unique ability to help encourage greater personal responsibility among individuals to manage their oral health and develop healthy behaviours that help reduce the onset of long term conditions.
Relaying these messages, however, still requires something of a mind-shift, both among the public and corporate sphere. For example, dental insurance continue to be viewed as a benefit set apart from overall healthcare benefits.
However, dental is one of the few preventive healthcare benefits open to employees, as benefits such as PMI are used to treat illness - not to help prevent illness from occurring.
Prevention
The roundtable explored also how dentistry can play a greater role in prevention and early intervention of long term conditions. This, in turn, can reduce budget spends and contribute positively towards the patient's health experience, reducing the need to visit the GP and thus sharing the responsibility across the primary care sector.
This is ever more important against the backdrop of strained public finances, new NHS systems in England and new structures focused on public health.
Making this a success will, however, require significant input from organisations across the UK as well as continued cross-working with dental care providers.
Providing schemes such as Denplan encourages regular dental attendance thereby increasing the awareness of the benefits of good oral health and the wider impact on general wellbeing.
