Course Goals

The goals of this EQIPP: Oral Health in Primary Care course are to:

• Acquaint you with the importance of the dental home, caries risk assessment, anticipatory guidance, and fluoride varnish application. All of these can be done by pediatric primary healthcare providers (PPHPs) in their office. 
• Help you create plans for improvement to address gaps identified in key clinical activities of oral health care. You will collect baseline and follow-up data as you work to improve care and processes through Plan, Do, Study, and Act (PDSA) cycles. 

Learning Objectives

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

• Recognize the role pediatric primary healthcare providers (PPHPs) play in providing oral health care, including: 

• Understand the importance of a dental home
• Identify the roles of PPHP in facilitating the establishment of a dental home
• Recognize the various facets involved and barriers in setting up a dental home
• Understand the dental caries process and impact of Early Childhood Caries (ECC)
• Know the process of performing a caries risk assessment
• Identify groups that are at high risk for dental caries
• Understand the importance of maternal oral health
• Provide age-specific oral health anticipatory guidance 
• Delivery oral health and injury prevention patient education
• Be familiar with fluoride varnish—who should apply it and how it is applied
• Address families’ concerns about fluoride varnish 
• Understand the process for procuring, storing, and billing for fluoride varnish
• Measure and improve care delivery and processes concerning oral health care by doing the following: 
• Collect and analyze baseline data to establish a starting point for improvement. 
• Identify one or more performance gaps in one or more key activities of oral health care. 
• Create an improvement plan for closing identified performance gap(s) by clarifying the improvement idea to be tested: 

AIM: What are we trying to improve or accomplish?
MEASURES: How will we know that a change made is an improvement?
CHANGES: What changes can we make that will result in improvement?

• Test your ideas quickly, on a small scale, so you can determine if the changes lead to improvement.
• Collect and analyze follow-up data to measure the results of your test.
• Determine how to sustain successful changes and how to systematically integrate them into the culture, processes, and workflow of your practice.
• Create additional improvement plans and repeat PDSA cycles until you reach the maximum potential of providing optimal oral health care for patients in your practice.