Dental Services
THE Community Dental Service or Lanarkshire Salaried Primary Care Dental Services (SPCDS), complements the care provided by general dentists in Lanarkshire.
Working across Lanarkshire this service provides care in health centres, hospitals, and care homes and occasionally in your own home.
Mobile dental vans also allow us to provide dental care at the more remote and rural schools across Lanarkshire.
These services provide dental care for the groups in our community who have special requirements that make it difficult or inappropriate for them to receive treatment in the normal dental setting.
The types of patients treated by the community dental service include:
• Children with dental anxiety or with high levels of dental disease,
• Patients with learning disabilities,
• Patients with a range of physical and psychiatric conditions,
• Patients with complex medical issues impacting on their dental care,
• Frail elderly,
• Patients within palliative care.
Patients can be referred to the community dental service by general dental practitioners, general practitioners (GPs) and other healthcare professionals. Patients are seen by appointment, Monday to Friday.
The community dental service can be contacted at:
Dental Office
Glendoe Building
Coathill Hospital,
Hospital Street,
Coatbridge
ML5 4DN
Telephone: 01236 707 711
Dental care for homeless
Community dental services run a service for all homeless people in Lanarkshire on Wednesdays from 6:30pm to 9:00pm.
To make an appointment contact the Health and Homeless service on 01698 727 534.
The service is located at:
Douglas Street Clinic
19 Douglas Street
Hamilton ML3 0BP
Oral Health Educators
A team of oral health educators are employed to provide a service to each of the community health partnership localities in Lanarkshire.
These educators deliver the Childsmile core toothbrushing programme.
Through a variety of teaching sessions children, parents and staff are educated on all aspects of oral health and this is reinforced by staff in each establishment on a daily basis.
Additionally the oral health educators distribute the dental homecare packs, containing a toothbrush, toothpaste and an information leaflet to children in nurseries twice a year and to all primary one and two children once a year, delivering an oral health education lesson.
Childsmile
Childsmile is a national programme designed to improve children’s oral health and reduce oral health inequalities. The programme consists of three main elements:
Childsmile Practice - targets children from birth and promotes oral health improvement and prevention of decay through primary care dental services and local community dental settings.
Every child in NHS Lanarkshire, born on or after 1 January 2005, can access Childsmile.
The dental team will provide advice and support on keeping your child’s teeth healthy and, as your child gets older, additional preventive care such as fluoride varnish and fissure sealants.
Childsmile Core Programme – involves the free distribution of oral health packs to every child in Scotland on at least six occasions during their first five years of life and free daily supervised toothbrushing to every three and four-year-old attending nursery.
Free daily supervised toothbrushing is also offered to children in schools within high priority areas.
The Nursery and Primary School Toothbrushing programme aims to:
• Deliver fluoride toothpaste to the enamel surface of the teeth to prevent tooth decay,
• Establish good habits from an early age,
• Teach children toothbrushing as a life time skill.
Childsmile Nursery and School - targets children who would may benefit from additional preventive care.
This additional care will take the form of twice yearly application of fluoride varnish to the teeth of children attending nursery and primary schools within high priority areas.
This part of the programme will start within NHS Lanarkshire during 2009/10.
For more information on Childsmile visit the Childsmile websiteor contact Susan Frew, Childsmile Co-ordinator on 01236 772035 or email susan.frew@lanarkshire.scot.nhs.uk .