Each year many dentists embark on mission trips to foreign countries. This article shares what one group learned in their journey over the course of 17 years to bring oral health to a rural community in Honduras. The group began by delivering acute dental care, but soon realized that this treatment would never change the status of oral health in the community. Year by year they learned what worked and what did not. A school-based dental prevention program was initiated using proven preventive techniques to demonstrate to the community that prevention of oral disease was possible. As of 2015, the school-based program had grown to over 10 schools and nearly 1,000 children had benefited from this program. Children in the program received all necessary treatments for the prevention and treatment of dental caries. As importantly, they and their families learned to understand how to be responsible for their own dental needs. In conclusion, it is possible to effect long-term change in a developing country by focusing on prevention of oral problems rather than focusing on the extraction hopeless teeth. The good intentions, time, and financial resources of volunteers can be put to best use by first learning about the needs and wants of a particular community. The authors recommend that volunteers partner with local health-care providers and research what other organizations are currently doing in their country of interest.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 2. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 19 July 2019.
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#15,422,946
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Outputs of similar age from Frontiers in Public Health
#64
of 101 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 22,996,001 research outputs across all sources so far. This one is in the 32nd percentile – i.e., 32% of other outputs scored the same or lower than it.
So far Altmetric has tracked 10,195 research outputs from this source. They typically receive more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 10.0. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 54% of its peers.
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