Oral disease is preventable. Primary care professionals and others have a significant role to play in promoting oral health and preventing oral disease.
Our value proposition – integrating oral health as an essential component of whole person care – is foundational to interprofessional education. The value of interprofessional oral health education and collaborative practice is improvement in overall health and well-being for all, including historically underserved populations. Payors, providers, and communities also benefit from a healthy population.
NIIOH is working across the healthcare workforce to increase oral health literacy and advance new solutions to reduce the burden of oral disease. We cultivate a growing network of oral health champions, connecting and aligning national organization leaders and cultivating new oral health champions through education and peer learning about innovative approaches to preventing oral disease. NIIOH has grown a network of interprofessional leaders across education, research and clinical practice who are leveraging their unique capacity to promote oral health.
NIIOH convenings facilitate interprofessional dialogue and agreement by fostering a shared knowledge base and vocabulary to bridge understanding, communication, and skills related to oral health. These strategies inspire a philosophy of “collective impact” where we work across professions in mutually supportive ways to create a movement that drives change.
NIIOH and its core partners, Smiles for Life, OHNEP, and the PA Leadership Initiative in Oral Health offer tools and resources that catalyze systemic change across education, practice and policy.
