Dentistry

Smoking Cessation and the Dental Team within West Yorkshire 2007

 

Health promotion initiatives within dental practice have changed significantly over the last 10 years. The gateway into NHS dentistry is recommended to be via an oral health assessment and this can highlight aspects of preventative work that can be carried out with the patient. One example of lifestyle advice is smoking cessation. The challenge for dental teams is to provide patients with sensitive and appropriate advice in a timely and cost-effective way. This advice should impact positively on patients and create opportunities for multi-disciplinary collaboration between dental teams and other health care providers. To date, smoking cessation activities carried out within dental practices have been ad hoc and not well documented. This means that identifying best practices and training needs has been difficult.

This three-year research programme is now within its second year.

What we aim to do:

  1. Assess the range of stop smoking activities currently being carried out by primary care dental teams in West Yorkshire against the background of changing policies and guidelines.
  2. Formulate and identify exemplars in the primary dental care setting (training, outcome, in-house policy and good patient experience) related to smoking cessation activities within the dental team.
  3. To create guidelines for practitioners in this field to work with patients who smoke
  4. To identify whether and to what extent the context of dental practices affects smoking cessation activities (policy and guidelines).

 

Update!

We have already successfully carried out:

  1. A baseline audit of dental practices in West Yorkshire to find out the contribution dental teams make within health promotion and identify any barriers. The follow-up questionnaire to all practitioners will be circulated from September 2007.
  2. Working with various practices in West Yorkshire to refine their smoking cessation activities with patients and share current practice.
  3. Design appropriate training for dental teams with verifiable CPD attached.
  4. Work with undergraduate teaching programmes to ensure smoking cessation training in included within the syllabus.
  5. Raise awareness of smoking cessation activities within dental practices within the wider smoking cessation community.