Whiter, brighter and stronger smiles
JAIDEEP SHENOY
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It’s important to take care of our teeth.
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Photo: R. Eswarraj
DENTAL CARE: A school teacher leafing through literature on dental care at the training programme.
The theme of the National Oral Health Programme launched by Indian Dental Association and Colgate is ‘Bright Smiles, Bright Futures’. Protecting our teeth is important.
This while striving to provide something for everyone in India in terms of improving oral health care, also aims at protecting the dental health of the future citizens of India – children.
Taking a cue from the parent body, the Dakshina Kannada district unit of IDA adopted a two-pronged strategy in ensuring that all concerned had bright smiles paving the way for bright futures.
The strategy included not only conducting a half-day seminar for teachers from various schools in and around Mangalore on various aspects of dental health care, but also conducting school dental health programmes for the benefit of students.
Manjunath Rai, president of Dakshina Kannada district unit of IDA says that the IDA sees teachers as an important vehicle to carry home the message of oral health care to the most important constituency, namely the students.
If we are able to inculcate good practices such as right way of brushing our teeth to students, this would stand them in good stead for rest of their lives. Teachers can inform the students about this, he says.
Dental care
In order to ensure that the teachers were fully conversant with how to teach the students about oral health, the IDA availed the services of specialist to talk to the teachers using audio-visual aids such as slides, video cassettes, charts, models and so on.
The teachers were also given some of these aids to be displayed in their respective schools so that they could use the same while communicating ideas learnt to the students, he points.
About the school health programme, Dr. Rai says the district branch hopes to cover around 50,000 primary school children from 120 different schools in and around the city in a phased manner for a period of one month.
“The association has covered more than 7-lakh-odd students in the last 1-1/2 decades that the programme has been going on in the district and has given us some very good results over the years,” Dr. Rai points.
This programme includes talk on dental health care with help of audio-visual aids as well as demonstration on proper oral hygiene techniques such as brushing.
Each student who attends the programme would be provided with a dental health pack, consisting of tooth brush, tooth paste and literature on dental health care free of cost, he says.
The IDA has already sought permission from schools to conduct the programme, he adds.
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