After months of hard work, you are now an oral health educator (OHE), and you may be wondering how to utilise your new qualification to its full capacity.
As an OHE, you have a crucial role in educating others about oral diseases and their prevention through promoting and empowering others to adopt healthier habits. This makes your qualification relevant not only within the dental team but also in your community.
Firstly, your qualification can be used within dental practices to take on a more active role in patient care. This can involve running your own treatment clinic and providing patients with toothbrushing instructions and diet advice.
By taking on this responsibility, you will also benefit dentists and dental hygienists/therapists in your team, as they can refer patients to you, saving precious clinical time within their own appointments. This is good encouragement for your team to integrate your scope of practice as an OHE into patient treatment plans.
Outside of the dental practice, there are many places your qualification can be put to use. This can include going into schools. Educating young children on how to care for their teeth is vital in helping to instil good oral hygiene and healthy eating habits from an early age, facilitating lifelong good oral health.
In addition, as an OHE, you are trained to tailor communication and advice to the needs of the individual. Working in hospital settings facilitates the development of these skills because you could be working with a variety of patient groups – for example, those with cognitive impairments or requiring palliative care.
Other patient groups you can involve yourself with include pregnant/nursing mothers. Local ante-natal groups can require OHEs to teach mothers how to care for their teeth during the hormonal changes of pregnancy and teach mothers and other caregivers how to care for a baby's teeth.
Moreover, care homes can depend on OHEs to teach carers and elderly residents how to improve their oral health and prevent the need for invasive dental treatments. Often these groups require modifications to their oral hygiene regimes to cater for medical conditions that impair dexterity or mobility, which is where your knowledge can be of great help.
Charity work is another option, where you can work alongside other dental team members to promote oral health in impoverished communities. Such roles highlight the benefits of gaining an OHE qualification in giving great job satisfaction and positively impacting the community.
Furthermore, if you're considering progressing into dental hygiene/therapy, an OHE qualification showcases a strong foundation of knowledge and skills to build upon and boost the strength of your application.
Over the years, prevention has become the heart of dentistry. Through the impact of social media, there has also been a rising demand for aesthetic treatments such as Invisalign. A disease-free mouth is ideal for maximising results with this kind of treatment. These factors give a great platform to employ your OHE qualification in helping to improve the public’s awareness of how to avoid poor oral hygiene/habits and the accompanying health and aesthetic concerns these can bring.
Written by Sahajta Chauhan