Making prudent healthcare happen: http://www.prudenthealthcare.org.uk/
Michael Allen, General Dental Practitioner, talks about how Prudent Healthcare affects the field of dentistry.
“NHS Wales really needs to look at encouraging practitioners to apply the most modern ways of managing dental disease – to move away from an environment where disease was ‘treated’ as such, to an environment where disease is not only treated or managed but also prevented as well. And there’s no doubt that there would still be a lot of ‘nuts of bolts’ dentistry to be done – for want of a better expression – restorative dentistry … people have fillings, teeth will break, people needs crowns and things like that … crown treatments and dentures … all the rest of it, but what needs to be happening alongside all of that is that practitioners are able to manage high disease levels in those patients who are most as risk of that sort of thing or who actually present with that sort of thing, but also to prevent future generations from presenting like that and to engage with patients and to try and help patients to help themselves as well because at the end of the day the major dental diseases are preventable.
We need to tie in very closely with what’s happening within the ‘Design to Smile’ programme within Wales for improving dental health, particularly in our children but probably rolling that out into care homes and the wider community as well. So we’re giving one message in primary dental care and children in schools getting the same message and they’re getting the same message again in our practices with their parents sitting next to them.
And also, we have a role as healthcare professionals to talk about smoking cessation, people’s diet – the fact that there are high levels of sugar intake in Wales, high levels of diabetes – and that people need to be helped to take responsibility for those areas of their health to help them to prevent needing to see the dentist quite so often, which is a bit of a ‘win situation’ for most people!”
http://www.prudenthealthcare.org.uk
http://www.1000livesplus.wales.nhs.uk/prudent-healthcare
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