Article
2020 could have been the year we made progress in tackling the level of early childhood caries (ECC) in the UK, however, COVID-19 has meant a delay in dental recall and treatment.
Inevitably, dentists should expect to see an increase in paediatric emergencies, and children with ECC, which was once incipient, and more easily treatable, has now progressed, warranting more advanced treatment or treatment under sedation.
With dental practices reopening, the focus is on emergency management and, although this is of course a priority, where does this leave our all-important prevention?1 Prevention has not lost value, and without it we risk a further increase in ECC, further children in pain, taking regular analgesia and antibiotics, and ultimately needing extractions of multiple teeth. In this way, ECC is both an expense to the NHS but also a 100% preventable disease.
It is now more important than ever that, as GDPs, we take responsibility to ensure implementation of effective preventive strategies for those children that we do see. As well as attending to dental emergencies, oral hygiene instruction should also be provided as part of holistic patient care. In this effort, it may be prudent to extend the responsibility to our colleagues in oral and maxillofacial surgery who are attending to paediatric emergencies, as they too share a role in the oral health of the paediatric patient.
Overall, oral health contributes to general health and so, most importantly, I feel eventually we may need to involve GPs more heavily in the promotion of oral care. A study has shown that 0.3% of patient attendances across 30 medical practices in a year were for oral/dental problems.2 Despite this, it has been reported that GPs have generally received little training related to oral health and so are unable to provide effective preventive advice.3 It could be time for dental practices to reach out to their local GP surgeries and offer important information about basic prevention so as to add another team to the effort against ECC.