Abstract
“The Dental Health Promotion Class for Infants and Parents”is one of the services at Fukuoka Health Promotion Center. The class is aimed at infants and their parents in the city of Fukuoka, and provides dental examination, dental health education, and topical fluoride application for the children. Visitors are recommended to have family dentists to manage and promote their dental health after the class.
In the present study,436 pairs of visitors were surveyed to evaluate the class and to discuss the future policy.
The standard age of the infants was 2.15 years old, and the rate of first-born children was high at 81.9%. The information about the class was mainly obtained from the campaign at 1.5 year-old medical and dental examinations performed at the health and welfare centers followed by the city newsletters. For most visitors, their purpose was to receive topical fluoride application, indicating general interest in fluoride application among population. Many questions were asked concerning tooth brushing, which showed the importance of tooth brushing instruction for the young visitors to the class.43.9% of the infants were found to have snacks irregularly, which indicated the importance of diet instruction as well. The data of df teeth of the infants was much lower than the standard values in the city of Fukuoka. The results suggest that the parents were highly interested and motivated with respect to dental health. However, most of their children had never received fluoride applications and never visited dental offices. Through this class, parents and children can therefore modify their behavior concerning dental health, and visit dental offices to have family dentists. By further developing this type of projects more domestically, comprehensive dental health promotion including caries, occlusion, gingivitis, periodontitis can be dealt with by family dentists.
