Agenda item
Update on children’s oral health in Nottingham City
- Meeting of Children's Partnership Board, Wednesday, 30th March, 2016 4.00 pm (Item 37b)
- View the background to item 37b
Report of the Interim Director of Public Health and the Corporate Director for Children and Adults
Minutes:
Sandra Whiston, Consultant in Dental Public Health, Public Health England, introduced the report, highlighting the following:
(a)
good oral health is integral to general
health and wellbeing. It is important that children are educated
about this at an early age as dental decay is most common in
children. Poor oral health can have wider impacts on education and
the economy;
(b)
despite overall improvement significant
oral health inequalities remain. Although dental decay is largely
preventable, extractions under general anaesthetic remain the most
common reason for hospital admission in 5-9 year olds. Nottingham
has the second highest experience of dental decay in the East
Midlands, after Leicester City;
(c)
since the Health and Social Care Act of 2012, local authorities
have had responsibility to provide or commission oral health
promotion programmes, monitor the oral health of the population by
commissioning oral health surveys, and provide water fluoridation
if deemed appropriate;
(d)
NHS England commissions all dental services, Health Education
England develops the workforce and Public Health England provides
expertise, evidence and intelligence;
(e)
Recent guidance from Public Health England has placed a bigger
emphasis on prevention, and recommends that local authorities focus
on oral health as a part of their health and wellbeing agendas.
Oral health promotion in Nottingham was recommissioned from April
2015 to:
· deliver a supervised tooth brushing programme within early year settings, targeting the most deprived wards in Nottingham City;
· train key health, social care and education professionals in order for them to deliver oral health advice to citizens;
· distribute oral health resources such as tooth brushes and toothpaste, based on evidence of need;
·
participate in national oral health
awareness campaigns.
(f)
access to dental care is good in
Nottingham, with 84% of practices taking on new patients which is
much higher than the national average. Uptake of care is improving,
particularly amongst children;
The following answers were given during the discussion which followed:
(g)
fluoridation of water has been
identified as an effective way of reducing oral health inequality.
Whilst there is no water fluoridation currently in Nottingham City,
this may be considered in future but would require a detailed
process identifying need and feasibility studies. This would also
then need to go through a public consultation;
(h)
providing dental care through schools would be convenient, however
it may still not reach all children and it would be better to
engage families with dental practices when children are young or
even engender the culture before they are born;
(i)
fluoridation of milk is done in some
other countries but has largely been decommissioned in the UK,
primarily around milk supply to children.
RESOLVED to
(1)
note the local authority’s responsibilities in
terms of oral health and the issues highlighted regarding the oral
health of children living in Nottingham including the potential
wider health, educational and economic impacts;
(2)
support the revision of the oral health pages of the
Joint Strategic Needs Assessment;
(3)
support the development and implementation of an Oral
Health Improvement strategy for the residents of Nottingham City
which will inform future commissioning strategies and collaborative
working with partners;
(4)
actively support current oral health promotion activity
and encourage increasing numbers of children and young people to
access dental services across the city;
(5) to discuss the feasibility of water fluoridation in Nottingham City.
Supporting documents: