collaborative Home for Oral Health

According to the IOM, Oral health care is essential to promoting and maintaining overall health and well-being, good health requires good oral health, yet dental care is far from universal. The IOM suggests expanding the oral health work force by training doctors, nurses, and other health professionals to incorporate oral health care into overall health care. Advanced Practice Nurses (APN) do not always know what to look for on an oral exam. APN’s can do fluoride varnish and charge for it, but many are not aware of this.  Additionally, dentists are not always sure what the systemic significance is of an oral finding. Dentists are not aware of the systemic effects of medications.  In order to address this educational omission and to develop more teamwork between APN’s and dentists, The school of nursing and the school of dental medicine received a grant to place APN students with dental students in the university dental clinic.  The students work in teams to address the oral health as well as systemic health needs of the patients in the clinic, all of whom are from underserved or vulnerable populations.

The purpose of the Collaborative Home for Oral health, Medical Management and health Promotion (CHOMMP) program is to benefit the vulnerable and underserved patient population that is served by the dental clinic and to develop interprofessional collaboration between dentists and APN’s. 

This presentation will discuss the challenges as well as the positive aspects of this collaborative project.  We will look at patient satisfaction with this unique delivery model. The teamwork concepts, the teamwork behaviors and the differences between this collaborative project and those with other health care professionals such as physicians will be addressed. The educational needs and challenges are addressed as well as the benefits to these patients and future models of oral health care will be explored.