The Childsmile (East) programme will see dental staff visit nurseries and schools twice a year, offering fluoride boosters and referring children who need further care to a local clinic. The scheme will be evaluated over three years with a view to rolling it out across the rest of Scotland.
Launching the programme, deputy health minister Lewis Macdonald said, 'Childsmile aims to make sure that we are getting good dental care to the children who need it most. We want to establish good dental habits at an early age and prevent tooth decay.This scheme is an innovative, and effective, way of doing this.'
The mobile dental programme started in Fife in January and has made visits to ten nurseries and several hundred children so far.
Children in Scotland have high levels of tooth decay compared with other European countries. The target set by the Scottish Executive in 1999 in in the initiative 'Towards a Healthier Scotland' is for 60 per cent of five-year-olds to have no obvious decay by the year 2010.
Latest figures for the school year 2005-2006 show an improvement, with 54 per cent of five-year-olds having no obvious decay, compared with 45 per cent in 2002-2003. However, oral health varies across Scotland, with much higher levels of decay in the most deprived areas.
