An oldie but a goodie: a ‘toothbrushing club’ founded by pioneering dentist Charles E Wallis in London in 1909.
We are now seeing the rollout of supervised brushing in early years settings in England. The policy, launching today, will target hundreds of thousands of 3–5-year-olds in the most deprived areas from April.
“It’s rare to find something to smile about in dentistry these days,” says BDA Chair Eddie Crouch, “but supervised tooth brushing is tried and tested policy that will save children from pain and our NHS a fortune."
It's a winning formula, invented by dentists and championed by the BDA for decades.
It’s also very welcome news that - in a break from the recently launched policy of 700,000 urgent dental appointments which is funded by recycling the existing dental budget – the schemes will be funded directly via the public health grant.
These programmes will have a dedicated revenue stream, that isn’t conditional on the crisis in NHS dentistry persisting. Earlier this year we pointed to new research that indicated that funding remained the number one barrier to uptake, with 4 in 10 English councils not currently able to afford to. This is the right choice.
The case for change here has been irresistible. We’ve long pointed to the Government’s own modelling that showed the scheme would pay for itself through reduced treatment need. Dedicated national programmes have been running in Scotland since 2006 and in Wales since 2009, elements of which have been exported worldwide.
As a profession we can take pride in the fact the fundamentals of supervised brushing programmes were developed by pioneering dentists working in London and the East of England in the late Victorian Era.
It does speak volumes on the attitude to oral health among successive governments that it has taken this long to reach a national rollout.
Having made this important first step, the new administration has a responsibility to go further and faster, both on restoring access to services and on prevention, particularly through mandatory action on the food industry on marketing, labelling and reformulation of food and drink.