What is the positive change that has emerged through new collaborations or partnerships during Covid-19 that your project is going to embed?

Given the sparse availability of dental services to those in care-homes and hospitals, provision of. lengthy dental services such as production of dentures is usually difficulty and expensive. During lock-down dentists were not able to provide any face-to-face clinical services and with ongoing guidelines suggestive that during escalation of alert levels there may be further reduced activity, access to provision of dental prosthetics could be very limited and may leave some patients for months without access to their prostheses.

This cross-dental-specialty project brings together various services and backgrounds as well as implementing technologies previously reserved for private sectors into work streams designed to improve access and affordability in an achievable and realistic manner. We hope to centralise the way in which care-homes and trusts are able to access support and information on improving the well-being of their patients and reducing the barriers creating inequality.

What does your project aim to achieve?

When patients living in care-homes or long term hospital stays loose their dentures, this can have a massive impact on quality of life. This includes the effects on eating, socialising and is known to have profound psychological impact. In cases of patients suffering from dementia or other neurological deficit, being able to communicate lost dentures or changes to coping ability, may be significantly impaired and the time lag in communicating this to staff who may be helped further impacts on patients abilities to lead normal functional behaviours.

Modern technologies in dentistry, have allowed efficacious and affordable ways to improve delivery of prosthetics with better production workflow methods and improved patient tolerance and acceptance of processes whilst reducing patient contacts.

Our project intends to use disruptive technologies to improve access to denture provision for those patient groups where accessing dentistry and new dental prosthetics are impaired by multiple, system lead barriers

How will the project be delivered?

Previous projects our team has run have reviewed the requirements of those in care-homes and found denture loss to be of significant effect. Our approach considers recording baseline needs and oral health status of patients longitudinally.

We aim to measure outcomes including quality of life parameters alongside tolerance of digital workflows, speed of delivery and integration of the interventions into the current workspaces with the effects on the care home staff and community dental services too.

Financial impact on services is easily interpreted through cost assessment against current models as well as future continuity requirements. Risks regarding data management are considered through data sharing agreements and NHS data storage requirements.

Our team is to explore the full remit of project requirements utilising a broad scope of skills and professional insight including –

• Clinical dental technician
• Community Dental Services
• Consultant lead Public Health
• Specialist Surgeon

How is your project going to share learning?

Other publication within the peer-reviewed literature, we intend to share learning across the AHSN networks as well as through