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Director of the Fukai Institute of Health Science (Japan), Professor Kakuhiro Fukai is a visiting professor at Kanagawa Dental University and visiting researcher at Japan’s National Institute of Public Health. He also serves as chair of FDI’s Oral Health for Ageing Population Task Team (2015-2019, 2021-2024, 2024-2027). In addition, Prof. Fukai has served as director of Japan Dental Association and executive director of the 8020 Promotion Foundation (2013-2019), while maintaining a private dental practice for the past thirty years. Performing all of these roles simultaneously has provided him with practical experience and academic expertise at both the global and local level and in all stages of the evidence-policy-practice-evaluation cycle.
Maintaining Momentum: Improving Oral Health for An Ageing Population
It is predicted that by 2050, 25% of the world’s population will be over 60 years old. In this context, the coverage of dental care under universal health care regimes is an urgent global challenge. When assessing, diagnosing and treating older adult patients, dental professionals must first assess the physical and mental status (robust, frail, dependent, etc.) of the patient and then proceed to assess the gradual changes in oral function due to ageing (oral frailty). In order to detect oral function decline as early as possible, it is not enough to perform these assessments in the isolated context of outpatient dental services. Regional community health care networks need to establish collaborative assessment and/or information sharing systems that integrate the efforts of dental clinics, nursing homes, other health services, and other stakeholders.
To this end, the OHAP Season II project team (2021-2024) developed a web app to help dental professionals assess the physical/mental status and oral frailty risk-level of older patients.
A new phase of OHAP (Season III) starts in May 2024, so the focus of my presentation is to share the plan and expected outcome of this next phase.
Learning objectives
- To understand the focus and expected outcomes of new OHAP project (Season III, 2024-2027)
- To understand the need for assessment and education to improve the oral health of older adults regardless of a country’s economic status and health care system, with an eye to achieving UHC goals.
- To understand the effectiveness of using a web app to maintain and improve oral function in the context of physical and mental status decline