Childsmile Plenty to smile about
The Childsmile project has seen major improvements in children’s oral health, but there’s still much work to be done
I
t is nearly a decade since the Dental Action Plan laid the foundations of what has become the hugely successful
Childsmile programme in Scotland. Since that time, there has
been a dramatic improvement in the oral health of primary school children in Scotland, with the latest figures showing 68 per cent of P1 pupils with no obvious decay experience, up from 51 per cent in 2004. Graham Ball, Childsmile
director and chair of the national dental epidemiology co-ordinating committee, which co-ordinates the National Dental Inspection Programme (NDIP), welcomed the latest results for the dental health of five-year-old children and emphasised the substantial progress seen since the programme began in 1988. He said: “We still have more
work to do – a substantial proportion of children still start school having experience of dental caries.” Speaking during the recent Childsmile Symposium at the Beardmore Hotel in Clydebank, Childsmile director Professor Lorna Macpherson insisted that those within the programme were not getting complacent. She said: “If you look at
where we have got to with regards to the NDIP stats over the last 10 years, I think the health improvement we have seen has been wonderful.
30 Scottish Dental magazine “But, as with any programme,
you don’t want to rest on your laurels and think you can’t do anything differently. We now need to look at the fact that the improvements are maybe slightly tailing off, so we need to look back and reflect on what more we perhaps could do to continue this improvement of our children’s oral health in Scotland.” Professor Macpherson
explained that, while oral health is improving, inequalities still persist and the programme aims to tackle this in the future. She said: “We are still not
seeing as much of a reduction in inequalities as we had hoped. It is maybe quite early days yet, but that is very much the direction of travel required in terms of the strategic direction of the programme as a whole.” She said that this focus on inequalities was one of the reasons Professor Richard Watt was invited to give the keynote address at the symposium. “His area of expertise is in approaches to tackling inequalities and understanding the social determinants of health. We feel that the guidance and the information he has given us can help with regard to developing our strategies for Childsmile into the future.” Professor Watt graduated
from Edinburgh in 1984 and is currently a professor of dental public health at University College London. His
“The overall levels of disease are improving, and that is important”
professional focus is on health inequalities in general and how oral health fits into that. He said: “For me, as an
observer of the programme, the biggest challenge for Childsmile is this notion of how to really tackle health inequalities within Scotland. “The overall levels of disease are improving, and that is important, but inequalities by deprivation are still a major problem. To
achieve an improvement in that means different things need to be done, and that is really the message that needs to get across.” David Conway, senior
lecturer in dental public health at the University of Glasgow Dental School, took up the theme of tackling inequalities: “The gradient is not shifting – those from the poorest backgrounds have the most decay and we need to make sure
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