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BDHF chief executive Nigel Carter at the Houses of Parliament
around oral health. Te Mouth Cancer Action Month each November helps raise awareness of a condition that remains a major killer and which is the cancer with the fastest-growing incidence.
What more do you hope to achieve? Te BDHF is pretty unique in its role, with few organisations world- wide carrying out the same work to promote oral health. With our international arm we hope to take our campaigns to a much larger world audience and help improve global oral health. We have recently completed the translation of our website material, which is widely viewed by international audiences, into several major world languages.
Te foundation has run a number of high-profile preventative dental/public health campaigns in recent years – should more emphasis be placed on prevention in dental practice? It is an issue both I and fellow
dental professionals feel extremely passionately about. Te message of prevention is one that often gets lost in translation, when it should be the highest priority. I believe the focus is too heavily weighted on cure, as too many people attend the dentist to correct poor oral health. If a ‘prevention is better than
cure’ message played a prominent role in dentistry today, we would not be faced with some of the problems we see on a daily basis. A lot of work is being done with children, particularly in areas of high experience of disease, to institute prevention at an early age and, with time, we can hopefully see future generations having an expectation of good oral health.
You also campaign to highlight other issues, such as oral cancer. In your opinion, what are the main issues affecting the dental profession today? Mouth cancer is a major issue for the future and the rise in incidence is particularly worrying. Te
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profession really needs to get on board with improving early detection of this killer disease. I believe there is still quite a way to go when it comes to educating enough people about mouth cancer. Mouth cancer claims more lives
every year than cervical and testicular cancer combined yet awareness levels remain low. Cancer Research UK highlighted the problem by discovering a shocking 40 per cent rise in mouth cancer between 2002 and 2012. We will keep working tirelessly to ensure that everyone can recognise the risk factors and symptoms related to mouth cancer and help people receive treatment early enough so that it does not prove to be fatal.
If you were in charge of NHS dentistry in the UK, what would you change? It has been said that “the worst
thing to happened to British teeth was the National Health Service”,
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