New York City Health Department's Oral Health Framework

A city department restructured and made efforts to take additional public health actions. The goal of this proposed session will be to educate the audience on the importance and feasibility of incorporating a public health approach to local health departments’ dental programs and related agencies by utilizing existing/limited resources. Panelist will demonstrate feasible implementation recommendations such as-  1) Establish a cross-functional team to launch oral health focused activities   2) Understand prevalence of oral health diseases and modifiable risk behaviors of population of interest by leveraging existing data or by conducting surveillance activities 3) Participate in or establish a multi-stakeholder public-private oral health task force 4) Collaborate with other programs for shared messaging on risk factors for sub-populations.  Presentation will provide examples of effective dental public health interventions and oral health promotional activities, including a large scale health promotion campaign using NYC’s media outlets, qualitative and quantitative surveillance activities and partnership activities with stakeholders to target vulnerable populations.