Project Smile is focused on dental health as dental poverty has increased in the UK especially in children or families. With large admissions with hospitals demonstrating a lack of access to dental facilities. We also identified lack of education, cultural and language barriers towards oral hygiene.
The aim of the project is to implement a change in behaviour and encourage individuals to maintain their oral hygiene. Therefore, we want to work with food banks to gain access to areas of poverty and provide free resources monthly if they complete a reward card that get ticked off every time, they brush their teeth. They will send this to us every month if its complete we send more resources.
The issue with this cycle is that we need incentives. Therefore, we are trying to partner with companies to supply us resources. We also have a team in this project of programmers who are making a mobile app with games to encourage a wider reach of individual to get involved and hopefully if we can turn this in to a desktop app and share this with external facilities like schools and partner with dentists to create a fun learning environment.
The project aims to provide children in poverty with resources so that they are able to carry out oral hygiene. This in turn will aim to change behaviour as well as educate children and their families. This will then hopefully decrease the oral hygiene poverty rates in Leicester if we are able to cover multiple parts of the city, reduce A and E admissions and ensure children receive access to dental care services.