HRSA/MCHB 2005 FEDERAL/STATE PARTNERSHIP MEETING

PUBLIC HEALTH ACROSS THE LIFESPAN

Improving the Oral Health of CSHCN through the lifespan

BETSY ANDERSON: Well, Family Voices is very pleased to be partnering with the Association of State and Territorial Health Directors and I think many of you here are very familiar with Family Voices, but just wanted to remind any of you who are not that we are a national network of families and friends. We are very pleased to be part of this growing network of 35 family-to-family health information centers. Family Voices provides technical assistance to those centers. Some are funded by the Maternal and Child Health Bureau and some by CMS and we’ll skip through some of these, but the parents play an important role in ensuring their kids get good dental care, ensuring their kids brush their teeth, all those good things. And again, I think that people are very familiar, I hope with Bright Futures. We have a new family guide in Spanish and of course, oral health is a significant component in Bright Futures, all the way through.

We also have a handout, which I hope you will have and there are really two things that we’ve been impressed with at Family Voices. One is, and it’s the focus of the session today, that there are some very special issues for kids, for kids with special needs. That’s on one side of your sheet. But there are also a whole set of regular issues that any kid could face. And for many of our kids that relate to dental care.

I also just want to remind you that we publish a bi-monthly newsletter. Oral health is frequently a topic of it and it’s a free newsletter. So that also is a handout.

And I just want to give you one little bit of information from a study we did. Nora Wells is right here. We worked on this study called “Your Voice Counts” in 2001 and the data that relates to our topic today. Two thousand two hundred and twenty families responded to a very extensive survey. I think we can all be pleased that 72 percent of families said that their children needed and received dental care, but I think there’s some problems with those last two figures. First, almost 20 percent of the families said their children needed and did not receive dental care. And we don’t’ know exactly why. We might have some guesses about that, but look at the last percentage. Yeah, nine percent of the respondents said that their children did not need dental care.

Now, there may be parents of young children, maybe confused about what age their kids should start to see a dentist. We know that’s a little problematic area. But looking at the kids who are age four and older, when probably everybody would think, should think that their kids should see a dentist, 59 percent of those respondents were parents of kids age four and older. So that is problematic, because that means that their message is that these families are not receiving, so they know their kids should be receiving care. And we want to encourage families to have relationship with their dentists and to have regular dental health visits. And I’m going to turn it back over to you, Jay, for the rest of the panel.