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Creating a dental home through school based partnerships
The hospital implemented and completed a successful fluoride varnish program for school aged children. The result of the demonstration pilot yielded high numbers of fluoride varnish applications and linkage to dental homes. While the program was implemented through various models, the most successful model was one in which there was school collaboration. Therefore, the hospital mobile health department utilized this model to create linkages to a dental home for high risk students in the Head Start population. The dental home program was accomplished through the dental team making visits to selected Head Start sites to provide comprehensive preventive oral health services, including screening, cleaning, fluoride varnishes, sealants and referrals as needed. The team worked closely with the school champion to ensure parental education and student engagement. Through this partnership, the students were able to obtain oral health care that otherwise would not have been as easily accessible
With a 100% oral health certificate completion rate amongst those students served by the team, there was also an increase in the schools compliance with federal Head Start requirements.
Implementation of health education strategies, interventions and programs
Provision of health care to the public
Learning Objectives:
Describe a best practice model for program replication
Identify barriers to access to oral health for vulnerable populations
Compare show rates for school based sites versus non school based sites
Demonstrate the benefits of hospital and community based partnership models
Keywords: Oral Health, Child Health Promotion
Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I am the director of the oral health team that provided the services in th pilot project. I worked closely with the team to arrange the site selections and evaluate program deliverable.
Any relevant financial relationships? No
I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.