In 2009, NIIOH launched its first pilot initiative designed to engage and transform an entire health profession in the fight for oral health. Physician Assistants are innovation-oriented, always ready to pilot new approaches and to share strategies broadly across health professions. The profession’s leaders from accreditation, education, certification, and practice came together with interprofessional partners to learn about the systemic connection between oral health and overall health. Ten years later, 96% of PA programs responding to a national survey had integrated oral health into primary care and educated graduates were almost 3 times more likely to integrate oral health into practice.
The PA Leadership Initiative in Oral Health is the physician assistant arm of NIIOH, a profession wide movement integrating integrating oral health into PA education and interprofessional practice. PA professional organizations are working in mutually supportive ways to advance policy, education, research and practice integrated oral health care.
OHNEP collaborates with nurse practitioners, nurse midwives, nurses and other health professionals to incorporate oral health into patient care. As a national voice promoting interprofessional oral health integration, OHNEP advocates educates, creates, and promotes resources that educators and clinicians can use to improve the quality of oral health care in their patients. The OHNEP page of our website includes their innovative virtual tools, publications, frameworks and more. Learn More.
With over 3 million visits and >500,000 courses completed for credit, Smiles for Life (SFL) a product of the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine, is the nation’s most comprehensive and widely used online oral health curriculum. Twenty professional organizations and 8 health professions endorse SFL. A free online curriculum of 11 independent modules SFL covers oral health issues across the lifespan. Modules can be completed online or downloaded to be used as education coursework; SFL provides many health professionals with up to 8 hours of free CE. Learn More
Our partners, whether they are educators, clinicians, communities, policymakers, researchers or payors are helping us determine, from their perspective, what is most needed across professions to support integrated solutions to population oral health.