Oral Health Promotion in Children in Kingston

The service will improve the oral health of children (aged under 12) and help to reduce oral health inequalities in this Kingston population, by providing Oral Health Promotion interventions over a 3 year period. The service provision will be as follows:

1. Develop and maintain an early years supervised toothbrushing programme for children aged under 5, within nursery and childcare settings, with a particular focus on implementation within maintained nurseries in schools. Partnership work will be established with early years teams to introduce the scheme initially amongst maintained schools and rolled out to other nursery settings thereafter. A programme of training and support for settings, as well as other quality assurance mechanisms is expected to follow the standardised national toolkit (Ref: GOV.UK (2016). Improving oral health: supervised tooth brushing programme toolkit. [online] Available at: www.gov.uk/government/publicati… ↗
2. Extend the existing priority primary schools oral health education scheme into 10 further schools. Toothbrush packs should be procured and provided with supporting evidence-based information learning materials to all nursery and Key Stage 1 children, all Year 4 and Year 6 pupils , and additional year groups where possible. A key contact in each school will be established, and a minimum of one set of face-to-face classroom teaching and assemblies annually will be delivered alongside toothbrush packs to all those within the targeted cohorts of school children.
3. Toothbrush packs and education for the under 5s and their parents/ carers will be provided through health visitor child development milestone checks at 6 and 12 months, and 2-2.5 years. This delivery of proactive oral health discussion between health visitors and parents/ carers will be supported by training provision by the service provider for the clinical staff teams.