Trailblazing: Has Someone Trod This Path Already?
This might sound like a lot of effort. Fortunately, much of the work has been done for us already, within the Healthy People initiative. With origins in the late 1970s, Healthy People is a process of establishing 10-year national goals and objectives to increase years of healthy life and reduce health disparities. Largely through the efforts of the dental public health community, every 10-year iteration has included at least 1 oral health objective.
The objectives are developed under the guidance of the US Department of Health and Human Services with input from interested individuals and organizations by means of Web-based and regional listening sessions. Each objective is tracked using databases such as those mentioned above.
In 2010, Healthy People set 17 oral health objectives for the 2020. As with the other Healthy People objectives, the oral health objectives are evidence-based, with a strong emphasis on disease prevention and treatment. For Healthy People 2020, an oral health objective has been identified as a Leading Health Indicator (LHI), acknowledging the increasing attention being paid to oral health by the public and policymakers. LHIs are a distillation of the Healthy People 2020 objectives, with a focus on critical and crosscutting health areas.
The selected oral health objective tracks the proportion of persons aged 2 years or older who have used the oral care system in the past 12 months. The assumption is that if it is possible to access the oral care delivery system, oral health will improve over time. As a greater percentage of the population gains this access, national oral health will improve.