Bas Vorsteveld, Haleon vice president and general manager Great Britain and Ireland, reveals his views on Labour’s Child Health Action Plan.
Last week, the Labour Party launched their Child Health Action plan. Whilst the Action Plan covers children’s health broadly, one of its seven points contains proposals to address the crisis we currently see in children’s oral health. Sir Keir Starmer said on the issue that tooth decay should be ‘consigned to the history books’ and on this we agree with him.
It’s clear to us that access to dental care is becoming out of reach for many in the UK and that current education around oral health is not sufficient. The rising inaccessibility of dental care and inadequate oral health education has led to one million children never visiting the dentist.
Meanwhile, oral health professionals are facing extreme pressure, with many looking to leave the NHS, exacerbating the already widely reported ‘dental deserts’ spreading across the UK.
Outside the surgery
Our Dental Health Barometer survey, produced in partnership with the College of General Dentistry, found that more than one third of NHS oral health professionals cited time constraints as the top reason for not being able to offer preventative care advice to patients. We want to find ways to support oral health professionals by providing this advice outside of the dentist surgery.
As a leading consumer health company, we feel responsible and determined to empower people to practice better every day self-care, assisting the oral health profession. Labour’s proposal of a supervised toothbrushing initiative, if well implemented, could enable children to understand how they can adopt preventative care as a daily habit, avoiding further issues in the long term.
We have significant experience in this through our Shine Bright campaign. We aim to help support schools in providing advice to children on dental care, helping inspire them to keep their teeth bright and healthy.
Educational resources
Recognising the pressures already on teachers too, we’re providing free resources for teachers and parents, for an engaging way to teach pupils about oral hygiene at home and at school. We’re also encouraging this through our partnerships with several charities such as the Oral Health Foundation and the Dental Wellness Trust, to donate milk teeth toothpaste samples, toothbrushes and provide educational resources to the communities in the areas that have seen the most dental disease.
By boosting supervised toothbrushing and offering to work in partnership with industry this proposal could play a part, alongside other initiatives, to significantly improve the profile of preventative oral care.
It is critical that children’s dental health is a universally prioritised objective and collaboration between government, the dental health industry and consumer healthcare is crucial in enabling this.
We eagerly await the government’s recovery plan for dentistry. We will continue to focus on preventative oral health care as a solution, empowering individuals and professionals, whilst looking at ways to develop new initiatives to support dental professionals in line with the announcement, so that we can improve better everyday health for all.
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