The number of people benefitting from the charity’s resources continues to grow. Regional and global initiatives being delivered by leading agencies / organisations and institutions are a key factor in this expansion:
The Lancet Commission on Oral Health
A grant helped to establish a Lancet Commission on Oral Health.
In July 2019, a ground-breaking oral health series was published in The Lancet. The series highlighted the global public health importance of oral diseases and the need for a radically different policy agenda to tackle this major problem. It comprised two major papers (Peres et al. 2019; Watt et al. 2019), two associated commentaries (Beaglehole and Beaglehole 2019; Kearns and Bero 2019), a perspective piece on the historical origins of modern dentistry (Barnett 2019) and a profile of a UK dental public health researcher (Davies 2019). Oral health was also the focus of the editorial. Never before in the 196-year history of the Lancet has oral health been given such a high profile.
The series generated considerable interest and led to the decision to establish The Lancet Commission on Oral Health. Twenty-seven experts, from 16 countries, engaged in academic research, policymaking, health and human rights advocacy, and clinical dentistry, were appointed as commissioners. Their work, which is near completion, focused on four key priorities:
- Global advocacy and policy development
- Equity, social justice and oral health
- Health system reform, governance and transformation
- Commercial determinants
GLOBICS - a Global Consortium of Oral Health-Related Birth Cohort Studies
The National Dental Research Institute Singapore has established the GLOBICS, a Global Consortium of Oral Health-Related Birth Cohort Studies (OHRBCS).
The primary goal of GLOBICS was to address already identified research questions, such as the independent associations among well-known risk factors with the most common oral diseases and conditions, which could benefit from increased statistical power and consistency in pooling data, from multiple studies. This approach also provided a strategy to explore interactions between oral health determinants and various socio-cultural influences, economic conditions, and health systems.
The second goal of the Consortium was to establish a long-lasting collaborative network among the global Oral health related birth cohort studies (OHRBCS), including capacity building among young scientists, epidemiologists, and statisticians from the various cohort teams, conducting substantial, ongoing, or recently completed oral health epidemiological studies inserted in OHRBCS.
Finally, the Consortium planned to disseminate the findings of the collaboration through scientific meetings and journal articles and facilitate the implementation of its findings into clinical and public health arenas.
These goals have been successfully achieved. Multiple articles have been published in peer-reviewed journals and funding has been secured from the National Medical Research Council of Singapore, to continue with this important initiative.
Digital Oral Health Survey
The WHO recommends using digital interventions and integrating technology into health care organisations to strengthen health care systems. Although interest in digital health is growing rapidly, it has been suggested that the oral health community has failed to keep pace with the advances in this field. The trustees were therefore pleased to support a project that sought to assess at a global level the potential for digital oral health and the organisational, governmental, and societal e-readiness. The work was conducted by the University of Montpellier, France, in collaboration with McGill University, Montréal. Canada, and the WHO. A two-step approach was used to gather quantitative and qualitative data. In the 1st phase an e-questionnaire was distributed to chief dental officers, across the world, to identify where digital oral health programmes had been implemented, the barriers and facilitators to introducing such programmes, the infrastructures in place to support implementation, the readiness at all levels to do so, the target populations, and the support that might be required. One hundred and one responses were received from 86 countries. A qualitative study was then conducted to gain an in-depth analysis on the perspectives of global policy makers and the readiness to use digital health technology at micro, meso and macro levels.
There were four key take-home messages that resulted from the research:
1. Advocate on the use of digital technologies in public oral health
2. Use of digital technology to improve oral health advocacy
3. Improve the digital health knowledge of oral health professionals and students
4. Integrate a sustainability concept in digital oral health programme.
Scoping Review of Upstream Interventions
Research indicates the limitations of clinical and educational interventions (downstream) in achieving long-term sustainable improvements in population oral health and reducing oral health inequalities and there is a consensus that a combination of downstream, midstream, and upstream interventions is required.
A grant was therefore provided to the University College of London, UK, to undertake a scoping review of global literature, to assess the effectiveness of upstream policy interventions.
Despite a very detailed and thorough search of the global literature, the scoping review identified a limited number of upstream interventions that focused on improving oral health, and an even smaller number of upstream interventions that tackled oral health inequalities. However, the review did identify three levels of upstream intervention including policies tackling the broader socio-political determinants of health, policies combating NCDs linked to oral health and some specific interventions (e.g., water fluoridation) focusing on oral health. It was concluded that the upstream approach to prevention remains highly relevant to public health policy and provides a guiding principle for future strategic action to promote oral health and tackle oral health inequalities. There is however a pressing need for more research to further develop the evidence base for upstream interventions using appropriate evaluation methods.
The review complemented the work being undertaken by the Lancet Commission which included a policy and oral health inequalities workstream. It also informed the work conducted by WHO on the Global Oral Health Action Plan.