Article
Oral health promotion within care homes
In June 2019, the CQC released ‘Smiling Matters’ – a review into the state of oral healthcare in care homes across England. The report found that there was an extensive lack of awareness of NICE guidelines amongst care home staff and that too many residents were not being supported to maintain and improve their oral health.
NICE have three quality statements that pertain to oral health in care homes:
The recommended assessment tool requires staff to be able to identify caries, retained roots, plaque and calculus. Given that patient management may be extremely difficult and that care homes lack the facilities of a dental practice, this is often a challenging task for a dental professional, let alone a healthcare assistant. Whilst there is some provision for dentists working in the Community Dental Service to carry out domiciliary visits, at present such provision is finite.
In light of this, the Oral Health Promotion team, based at Chippenham Community Hospital, have been visiting care homes to provide training.
We assessed the confidence of care staff in matters pertaining to oral care at three time points:
A summary of the results of the study are presented in Table 1.
| Staff Confidence In Oral Care-Related Topics | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Immediately before Training | Immediately after Training | Four Months after Training | |
| Staff that Attended Training | Staff that did not Attend Training | ||
| 66% | 98% | 93% | 75% |
I think the key finding from this study is that, whilst the training was very effective for those who received it, the confidence of staff that did not attend the training also improved compared to the baseline. This suggests that the training builds institutional knowledge that then cascades on to other members of the care team.
I hope this project highlights how important it is that members of the dental team work with and support care staff in helping to deliver improved outcomes to care home residents.