Dentistry oral health report for children under 5

Recently conducted national, regional and local research reports have indicated that Brent children have one of the worst oral health outcomes in England. They are fortunate to have a national programme of standardised dental health surveys as this provides robust, comparable data about levels of dental decay in the child population and a range of other dental related information about various other population groups.

Healthwatch Brent commissioned The Achievers Club, a Brent organisation to undertake a child oral health survey which is funded through the Community Chest.

The objective of this project was to determine the personal and family barriers for parents and carers of under 5s (U5s) in Brent that may contribute to the poor oral hygiene and additionally whether systemic or other barriers also exist.

Working with Public Health Brent, a questionnaire was designed to explore the effectiveness of dental services and family barriers to accessing dental information and their services. They collected the views of 284 parents and have presented an analysis and series of recommendations for consideration. The survey sample had an overrepresentation of parents who live in the Wembley area however, they do not believe these skews the perception data gathered.

This report provides vital information on the successes and continuing challenges that Brent faces from an oral health perspective. The data captured a number of factors that will help support and cement any future plans to tackle poor oral health.

The report findings demonstrated that the majority of parents found that it was easy to register their child at a NHS dentist and found their dentist to be child friendly, helpful and a source of advice. However, some parents (13%) found it difficult to obtain a suitable dentist appointments.

The survey did identify areas of concern, in particular 31% of parents had children who were unregistered with a dentist and 11% of parents were unaware that the NHS dentist was free for children. The report highlights concerns around children who did not own a toothbrush and had poor oral practices with respect to the frequency, duration of tooth brushing and rinsing.

The findings confirm that parents in general need more targeted education on dental hygiene for their children. Parents need to understand the importance of taking their children to visit the dentist as soon as their first teeth appear.

The recommendations include the need to raise awareness of good dental care practices that can be easily adopted by parents and their children through children’s centres and early years’ provision. This could be achieved by promoting supervised teeth brushing within all early years and school settings. In addition, a programme is required to educate parents and children on oral best practice including not rinsing their mouth after brushing their teeth, but rather simply spitting out the toothpaste. A dental education campaign would benefit all parents and provide them with an opportunity to learn more or reinforce their existing knowledge of dental oral health and hygiene.