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The authors state that this letter reflects their opinion on the oral health policy gaps in achieving ‘sustainable oral health’ with support of research evidences.
It is a well-known fact that oral health is an essential element of overall well-being as it eases people to perform regular activities like breathing, eating, and speaking. It also impacts on psychosocial aspects like self-satisfaction, happiness, without experiencing pain, discomfort, or shame.(Glick & Williams, 2021)
Oral diseases are considered as NCDs so it requires a multisectoral action plan as the latter to achieve universal health coverage. The top NCD causes with the highest deaths are cardiovascular diseases, cancers, respiratory diseases, and diabetes. Cancers include the oral cancers also, other than cervical cancer, breast cancer and lung cancer etc. Another reason which states the importance of oral health for our well-being is that both NCDs and oral diseases share risk factors of tobacco and alcohol, moreover some of the NCDs like diabetes etc have oral manifestations like dry mouth and candidiasis too.(World Health Organization,2022)
Oral diseases majorly consist of dental caries, periodontal conditions, oral cancers etc.
There have been changes in the oral disease patterns with change in life expectancy, demographic transition, diet, advent of technology etc. The status of oral health, as two sides of a coin has both positive and negative scenarios. On one side, there have been many advancements in methods of treatment, diagnostics, increasing dental colleges with their admissions, while on the other side there is a huge burden of oral diseases, catastrophic expenses due to treatments, insufficient staff with inadequate training etc.(de Sam Lazaro et al., 2023)
The need of the time is the multisectoral action plan for oral health which should be disease specific, involving the required sectors, with support from government, community. It also requires horizontal integration of the primary health care with the oral care system. Like, dental caries can be impacted by the food and nutrition sector, school sector. Likewise oral cancer, being a serious disease with a long- term impact, the pharmaceutical sector and the insurance sectors can get involved, while education and the health sector are the common stakeholders for all oral conditions.(World Health Organization,2022)
The oral health field is an interplay of clinician factors, patient factors and organization factors, where the ‘organization’ is health system and the clinician is a part of it providing services to the patient.(Lienhart et al., 2023)
The major element of a health system is its workforce which needs to be trained, adequately distributed in urban-rural areas. All health care workers including dentists should be trained with an inter and intra-professional approach of education. The community should be assessed for high-risk patients and even the mortality databases should be linked with insurance sector and health information systems. The government support should be taken in levying taxation policy on sweetened food and beverages, approving budget funds for oral health, oral health advocacy, initiation, and awareness of free oral health diagnostics. The preventive care should be incentivized for its importance, adapting it to the remuneration systems of dentists. Newer methods of diagnosis and treatment like m-health, AI and ML should be employed while continuing implementation research, majorly on tobacco control, areca nut consumption, green dentistry concept and nutrition to carry out evidence-based dentistry aligned to SDGs. .(World Health Organization,2022)(de Sam Lazaro et al., 2023)