Community Oral Health Promotion

Abstract

JKAOH is available at http://www.jkaoh.org pISSN 1225-388X / eISSN 2093-7784 According to the 2012 National Oral Health Status Survey, the decayed-missing-filled-teeth (DMFT) index was 1.84, which confirms the constant decreasing trend in dental caries over the past 10 years. This improvement in the national oral health status may be attributed to the socioeconomic development of our country, technological advances in dentistry, various effective oral health promotion programs, and increase in awareness of and interest in oral health care among people. Of these factors, oral health programs, which play a key role for community oral health promotion, have been expanding their services through various activities such as community oral health status surveys, problem identification, and project goal setting, implementation, and evaluation. For continuous progress of these oral health programs, it is important to focus on community oral health promotion, accurately identify problems by analyzing the community-wide oral health status, and evaluate the effects of the programs already carried out by systematically analyzing their outcomes. In this regard, a paradigm shift has recently occurred from the sector-dependent separate community health programs to the inter-sector joint operation of integrated health promotion programs. As a result, an increasingly large number of beneficiaries of oral health projects are profiting simultaneously from nutritional health projects or exercise interventions, thereby increasing the number of factors influencing community oral health promotion. However, there is a lack of research examining such integrated community oral health programs or evaluating the impact of the associated changes. For community oral health promotion, it is necessary to continuously support integrated oral health programs by analyzing their results, evaluating their effects, conducting opinions polls among the local program participants and professional staff, and incorporating the results of these polls in future programs. Such continuous support and research efforts toward various community-based oral health programs will contribute to the continuous improvement of oral health index.