Technique tips improving uptake of oral hygiene instructions

It can often be a challenge getting patients to improve their oral hygiene techniques, especially if they develop periodontal problems later in life and have to change the habits of a lifetime. One key factor to achieving success in this respect is ensuring that the patient understands the nature of periodontal disease, not just pathology but also anatomy. Once that is done, patients need to be shown what they need to do and, ideally, to demonstrate that they have understood what needs to be done in their daily home care regimens. Patients often suffer from ‘information overload’ during such consultations, so it is helpful if they can be given something to take away with them, usually in printed form, to help them remember the details of what they have been told. The Harnacke study from 2012 usefully confirmed that, the more personalized any such information is, the more likely patients are to follow the advice.¹ One way of doing this is take some photographs of what the patient needs to be doing and put these into an oral hygiene regimen instruction sheet (Figure 1) that can be stored as a blank template on the surgery desktop. Once the photographs have been taken, it is then simply a matter of dropping them into the template, filling in the patient's name and date, amending any details as required and hitting print. The personalized document can then be stored on the patient's file for future use and reference. Alternatively, it can be useful to use the patient's smart phone to record a short oral hygiene instructional video, which he/she can then replay at leisure.