The British Dental Association has welcomed the rollout of fluoridation in the North East – alongside supervised brushing nationwide – but stressed these policies while effective have been needed for decades, and the delays they have faced reflect the lack of priority placed on oral health among successive governments and especially at the Treasury.
Both policies will deliver a very strong return on investment, paying for themselves in the short to medium term according to official modelling through reduced treatment need.
The professional body says the new government must double down, go further and faster on both restoring access to care and on prevention, particularly through mandatory action on the food industry on marketing, labelling and reformulation of sugary food and drink.
It warns that any delay to Labour’s other key manifesto pledge – to reform the failed contract fuelling the crisis in NHS dentistry – will spell the death of the service.
BDA Chair Eddie Crouch said: “Water fluoridation has been around since the Second World War. Supervised brushing since Victorian times. Tried and tested policies, but it shows we need real pace here. Building an NHS dental service fit for the future won’t wait till the 22nd Century.”
The BDA has been a long-term champion of both policies.
While there has been a postcode lottery of provision in England for supervised toothbrushing, dedicated national programmes have been running in Scotland since 2006 and in Wales since 2009, elements of which have been exported worldwide.
The fundamentals of supervised brushing programmes were developed by pioneering dentists working in London and the East of England in the late Victorian Era. [1]
BDA Chair Eddie Crouch added: “It’s rare to find something to smile about in dentistry these days. But supervised tooth brushing is tried and tested policy that will save children from pain and our NHS a fortune. The only concern is why it’s taken a century to get here. Ministers need to go further and faster.”
Reference:
[1] Dentist Richard Denison Pedley, an early pioneer in dental hygiene, wrote a report on the “Teeth of Pauper Children” for the British Journal of Dental Science in 1893, becoming one of the first advocates for supervised brushing.
The report made clear the effect of poor dental health on the children’s ability to chew, and the importance of making sure that the same care is given to the first teeth as the permanent ones. They recommend appointing a qualified Dental Surgeon to every school, so that children’s teeth would be inspected regularly and preventative dentistry would save pain and the expense of extraction in the long term.
Pedley felt that the most essential part of a child’s education was the knowledge of its own body and how to treat it well. He wrote that the ‘tooth-brush drill’ was as needful as any other gymnastic exercise.
This image depicts the work of dentist Charles E Wallis, who was called on to examine and report on children’s teeth with a view to organising a school dental service.
Wallis was convinced that instruction in the hygiene of teeth should be given to all children and their parents. He introduced the concept of toothbrush clubs to a number of days schools in 1909 in London. The cooperation of head and assistant teachers was essential to the success of these clubs. Every 4 weeks the children had to bring their toothbrushes into school for inspection. They were instructed that after use they were to be well rinsed and then put outside to dry. The brushes were bought in bulk to reduce costs and were sold for 2 ½ d (1p). The children paid for their brushes in instalments of 1 ¼ – 1/12 d per week.
