Landing Forty Two in London provided a fitting backdrop for Colgate’s recent thought leadership event, Partnering for Prevention: From Evidence into Action.
The below content is intended for dental professionals only.
Partnering for Prevention: From Evidence into Action event brought together dental professionals from across the UK for an inspiring networking event, exploring how to bridge the gap between clinical and chairside reality.
The audience heard insights from a range of stakeholders focusing on caries prevention including moving beyond clinical data to put them into their patient’s shoes to better understand real-world challenges.
Reimagining a healthier future for all
Simon Petersen, senior vice president and general manager at Colgate, northern Europe welcomed the audience, sharing that Colgate’s leadership position is driven by their purpose of reimagining a healthier future for all.
He also said Colgate understands the significance and importance of evidence-based prevention and Delivering Better Oral Health guidance, including increasing fluoride availability and stating that Colgate is proud to have supported the dental profession with medically licensed evidence-based high fluoride products to prevent, control and arrest caries.
Simon concluded that he was delighted Colgate had brought together insights from the dental profession, consumers, researchers and academia to explore prevention and how we best translate evidence into action to improve oral health.
Dr Jason Wong, chief dental officer for England gave the opening keynote address themed ‘A call to action to improve the oral health of the nation’, sharing updates on the 10-year health plan and the dental quality and payment reforms. This included increased support for preventive care, risk assessment and oral health stabilisation, promotion of good quality evidence-based care, minimally intervention oral care and the appropriate use of skill mix.
Jason commented that he was aligned with the ‘partnering for prevention’ theme and supported the shared vision of taking knowledge, evidence and the right people delivering care at the right time to improve the oral health of the nation.
Pathways of prevention
Katie Mitchell, senior insights lead at Colgate, explored three pathways of prevention. Katie introduced the views and perceptions of real-world patients who had been unsuccessful, partially successful and fully successful across the pathways. This took the audience through the resulting impact of each, along with the patient’s suggestions of how their real world challenges could be better overcome to help them to improve both their compliance and oral health outcome.
Professor Jan Clarkson, chair of clinical effectiveness, University of Dundee shared the REFLECT study, a NIHR clinical trial, which commenced back in 2016, looking at the effectiveness and cost benefit of prescribing high dose fluoride toothpaste in preventing and treating dental caries in high-risk older adults.
The results are expected to be published later this year. However, Jan was able to share some key points including: dentists can identify patients at risk, caries experience is considerable and costly, 5000ppm fluoride toothpaste is part of the solution, however dentists must know who, when and how much to prescribe, and finally, patient behaviour change is possible, but this must be personalised and focus on oral hygiene and diet.
Professor Jo Hart, chair of health professional education, University of Manchester explored professional behaviour change to better understand clinical habits. Jo expressed how hard change can be and for change to happen, it needs to happen at multiple levels including dental professionals, patients and policy makers. Jo shared the Capability, Opportunity, and Motivation Behaviour (COM-B) framework as part of the Behaviour Change Wheel. This helps us to understand that unless what we do is behaviourally focused, it is less likely to change routine practice. Capability, motivation and opportunity must be enhanced to change practice.
From treatment-focused to prevention-led
This event brought together a group of insightful contributors covering expertise across contract reform, research, skill mix, behaviour change and general dental practice. A fireside chat session created the perfect opportunity to discuss a number of themes to help transform insights into a tangible road map for the entire dental team including keeping healthy teeth healthy across the life course, applying the evidence base in practice, the role of prevention in supporting the shift from treatment-focused to prevention-led care and the effective use of skill mix.
The final session was delivered by Emma van Eyssen, scientific affairs lead at Colgate and Dr Mohsan Ahmad, general dentist and LDN chair for Greater Manchester. Emma started the session with highlighting a number of resources Colgate provides to help dental professionals with the prevention, management and control of caries, in line with the evidence-base. Emma went onto introduce Colgate Duraphat as the only complete and clinically-proven high-fluoride range, medicinally licensed to prevent, control and arrest caries (see below for references).
Mohsan then took the audience through some real-life cases studies on how he and his wider dental team provide individually tailored optimal care for the prevention, management and control of caries across the life course.
The event concluded with a lively networking session allowing for great discussion which perfectly captured Mohsan’s final comment that together, we can shape the future of oral health.
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Adverse events should also be reported to Colgate-Palmolive (UK) by calling 00-800-321-321-32.
References
1. Baysan A et al. Caries Res 2001;35:41-46
2. Schirrmeister JF et al. Am J Dent 2007;20. 212-216
3. Ekstrand et al. 2008 Gerod 2008; 25:67-75
4. Ekstrand et al. Caries Res 2013;47:391–8.
This article is sponsored by Colgate.
