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HE WHOLE PATIENT


To achieve this, dentistry must be transformed together with its existing image, which sadly, for many, still reflects bygone practices and historic approaches to pain control. Given the scope of the challenge, there is little time to waste if the future and rapidly changing needs and expectations of patients are to be met.


MOVING MATTERS FORWARD Growing evidence suggests that the integration of oral healthcare into general healthcare creates opportunities for efficiency savings, allowing more people to be managed better within existing resources. In addition, patient satisfaction should be favourably impacted, and through enhanced inter-professional auditing and understanding, the process of identifying future research and development (R&D) priorities should be greatly facilitated. What then is stopping the planning and introduction of the necessary programme of change? Is it a lack of leadership, inertia in dentistry (as presently practised and perceived) or the opportunities afforded by the integration of oral healthcare into general healthcare provision not being on the “radar screen” of healthcare planners? Alternatively, is it down to a lack of joined- up thinking amongst all relevant stakeholders? In all probability, all of these factors and others are culpable. So, what is to be done to move matters forward? Do


we need more publications aimed at stimulating debate? Or, is it a matter of funding research to confirm the value of oral healthcare being integral to holistic general healthcare provision in the UK? Personally, I believe that the key is strong, suitably empowered leadership which has the confidence and trust of those who will be influenced most by change – patients, dental


millennials, funding agencies and those who will need to guide academic and postgraduate dentistry through the necessary transformational change. Is this a challenge for a College of Dentistry, which is now in the process of being formed, subsequent to the Faculty of General Dental Practice (UK) – FGDP(UK) – having announced its intention to become an independent body earlier this year. The recent FGDP(UK)/Simplyhealth conference entitled Holistic dentistry: putting the mouth back in the body may be the first step in rising to the challenge. If forward thinking individuals and informed patients had their way, holistic, whole patient care, including oral healthcare provision, would be high on the agenda of promising developments in UK healthcare provision.


Professor Nairn Wilson is emeritus professor of dentistry, King’s College London and, amongst other positions, chair of the Shadow Board for a College of Dentistry and a non-executive director on the MDDUS Board


REFERENCES 1. The New York Academy of Medicine Inter-professional care coordination: Looking to the future. www. macyfoundation.org/ docs/grantee_pubs/ NYAM_Issue_Brief- Care_Coordination.pdf 2. Wilson NHF Holistic care should be coming your way. Br Dent J 2017 223: 568-569.


MDDUS INSIGHT / 15


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