A quarter of five-year-old children in England suffer from tooth decay, a figure that doubles to 50% in deprived areas, leading to significant pain and affecting their eating habits, speech, quality of life, and school attendance.
Tooth decay is preventable through fluoride toothpaste and supervised toothbrushing programs in nurseries and early years at school. However, these programs face fragmented funding and implementation challenges. This project aims to improve the implementation and uptake of supervised toothbrushing programs by collaborating with stakeholders and employing various research methods, including qualitative analysis and co-design approaches. The project has developed an implementation toolkit to optimize supervised toothbrushing programs across England. The toolkit website has already received over 30,000 site visits. NHS England and the government are interested in utilising it. We have obtained future funding to test the toolkit out in practice further.
