Planning and implementing school oral health programs: A scoping review

Abstract

Introduction: Most school oral health programs (SOHPs) focus on either oral health education or preventive aspects of oral health. This scoping review emphasizes the significance of the knowledge application to design and implement SOHP which is more industrious and result oriented. Aim: To highlight, those school dental health programs which have approached the school oral health from all possible planes, i.e., education, prevention, treatment needs, and follow-up. Materials and Methods: Document 11 of WHO information series on school health for planning the intervention was utilized to obtain the initial benchmark for “best practices.” Electronic database MEDLINE, Cochrane central register of controlled trials, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects, and SCOPUS were searched. Our search strategy included a 3 staged extraction. The first based on the title, the second was based on abstracts and the third stage was based on the full text. Hand search of the key journals was also done. Results: A total of four studies were finally selected and studied to indicate the best practices of the programs. Conclusion: Public health dentistry should now focus on SOHP planning and implementation in terms of management. We need to expand our horizons beyond clinical outcome and short-term goals to accumulate knowledge.

Keywords

• Intervention
• oral health
• review