Prevention will fail if communication does not land

A few months into his role as senior editor of Dentistry.co.uk, Patrick Johnston comments on one theme that keeps coming through in almost every conversation: dentistry talks about prevention constantly. The harder question is whether patients and families are hearing us.

At the Birmingham Dental Show, Bupa Dental Health Is Live and the General Dental Council (GDC) Future Dental Leadership Network event, prevention was continually recognised as a priority. The message was clear. Dentistry cannot keep relying on treatment-led models and expect oral health outcomes, access pressures or National Health Service (NHS) costs to improve.

Research published in Frontiers in Public Health underlined the scale of the challenge. It projected that annual NHS treatment costs linked to dental caries and periodontal disease in the United Kingdom (UK) adult population could rise from £4.418 billion in 2020 to £5.301 billion by 2050, a 20% increase. It also projected that people aged 60 and over will bear 69% of caries-related costs by 2050, with untreated caries costs in that group growing by 168%.

That is the economic case. But prevention will not be achieved by repeating the same messages more loudly. It will depend on whether dentistry can communicate in ways that fit people’s real lives.

That distinction matters because so much public health messaging fails on delivery rather than content. An oral health session run by a local authority during midweek working hours, for example, may have the right subject and the right intention. But if the format excludes many of the working parents it is meant to reach, the message is already weakened before it lands.

What does oral health education done right look like?

That is why the industry examples that cut through deserve attention. Bupa’s The Dentist’s Apprentice, story showed how oral health education can be made memorable for children. Kev the Dentist’s toothbrush giveaway campaign turned a simple preventive tool into a visible public message.

Dr Rakhee Patel’s work with Tottenham Hotspur and the Give Up Loving Pop programme, which encourages children and families to reduce sugary drinks, showed the value of taking oral health education into trusted community settings.

These initiatives work because they start with the audience. They ask where people are, who they listen to and what will make the next healthy action easier.

That should be the test for prevention. Not whether the profession has said the right thing, but whether the message has reached the patients and families it is meant for, in a form they can understand, trust and act on.

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