Page 17 - ICD Newsletter November 2022 Final Draft6

Healthy Kids Cambodia We’ve set up a mailing list to keep everyone up to
date on the Cambodia National Action Plan for Oral
Despite being in-and-out of lockdown over the last 12 Health 2022-2030. We’ll send out a brief update
months since last November our team have managed every 2-3 weeks. Please CLICK HERE and consider
to serve over 6000 children. This involved performing signing up to the mailing list.
twice as many silver diammine fluoride (SDF)
treatments (>12,000 treatments), sealing over 9000 Bethy Turton
teeth and restoring nearly 1000 teeth. After seven bethy.turton@gmail.com
years of testing, communicating, and mapping out
our work, we now have a chance to use our learning The Kimberley Dental Team
to inform the government health system’s actions.
What this means is that the Healthy Kids team will do The Kimberley Dental Team Ltd. (KDT) is a not for profit,
our first demonstrations of the Healthy Kids program non-government, volunteer organization established
within the government system. In the coming in 2009 to address the significant disparities in oral
months, the team will work with two government health faced by Indigenous communities in remote
health centres to perform health screening and apply Western Australia. KDT’s mission is “to improve the
SDF in schools. This test project, and the feedback general wellbeing and dental health of Indigenous
we get from it, will inform the implementation of children and their families in primarily the Kimberley
the National Action Plan for Oral Health 2022-2030 region of Western Australia thereby reducing the
(NOHAP). The community at ICD has made this long-term cost and suffering dental disease inflicts.”
possible and those first two demonstrations will be
covered by our recently awarded ICD grant. In 2022, Teams of 8 to 9 volunteers, including seven
final year DMD students, were active for three
weeks in May/June and three weeks in late July/
August. A total of 791 patients were seen - 248
adults and 543 children. Using the Treasury/DVA
scale of fees, this represents $84,743 of adult care
and $157,091 of child care, a total of $241,834.
The 2,634 services provided included, in a broad
overview, 850 diagnostic services, 1208 preventative
services, 462 restorations and 214 extractions.

The Healthy Kids team from left to right: Mr
Mengchay, Ms Nary, Dr Tida, and Mr Kimhab

The NAPOH is the result of partnership among the
Oral Health Bureau, the University of Puthisastra, and
One-2-One Cambodia. There are four action areas (1)
Maternal child health where we hope to integrate
oral health promotion with routine vaccinations, (2)
School based health where were hope to include
topical applications of fluoride and oral health
screening with school-based health activities, (3) Last year, having been absent from the Kimberley in
Older adult support where we hope to pilot primary 2020, we provided more acute care and generally,
health care pathways, and (4) Oral cancer where we oral hygiene had waned considerably, especially
the remoter the area we visited. It was good to see
hope to find better ways of identifying soft tissue this year that improved oral hygiene was generally
lesions on gums, cheeks and tongues before the observed and there was less demand for acute care,
lesions become problematic. but still more than in 2018 and 2019. It is interesting

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