Each practice wanting to become a Healthy Living Dental Practice, will need to identify a practice lead and a dental champion.
Lead
The lead will be someone with a leadership role within the practice. This could be a practice principal, partner or practice manager. It is for the practice to determine the most appropriate person.
What will they do?
- Lead and have responsibility for Healthy Living Dentistry in practice
- Develop an action plan and provide evidence
- Ensure learning and delivery throughout the practice
- Organisational support to enable the health champion to deliver
- Ensure monitoring takes place
- Network with leads in other practices
Dental champion
The dental champion will be someone within the practice who can implement the Healthy Living Dentistry scheme. It may be a dental nurse or receptionist and ideally someone whose time is flexible to enable them to do this work. An extended duty dental nurse would be ideal, but these extended duties aren’t essential to undertake the role.
What will they do?
- Organise the campaigns
- Disseminate learning throughout the practice
- Support the lead in implementing the practice action plan
- Support any monitoring and gathering of evidence
- Network with health champions in other practices to share ideas
Training
The lead and champion are required to attend an evening training session and the champions will follow up with an online course (usually eight hours over a four-week period) and two half-day training courses.
The training is being delivered virtually through Microsoft Teams and can be booked on Health Education England’s Maxcourse platform.
All delegates are required to have a login for Maxcourse. If you do not have one already, it is quick and easy to create one online.
Further information about the training is outlined in a Healthy Living Dentistry practice leads’ presentation from Health Education England.
