Texas Oral Health Coalition

Programs: The coalition hosts an annual oral health summit focusing on topics designed to improve oral health awareness, increase interprofessional collaboration, improve public oral health and increase access to care. Txohc also offers continuing education credit for licensed dental related professionals to help maintain their required licensure. Summit attendees include dental and non-dental health professionals, academicians, students, social workers, public health officials, insurance providers, dental manufacturers and anyone interested in improving oral health of all texans. This organization also serves as a clearing house for information that can be disseminated to a broader oral health audience via social networking to include, but not be limited to, our website www. Txhoc. Org, www. Fluoridefortexas. Org and www. Oralhealthtexas. Org, maintaining a webpage on national website www. Toothwisdom. Org/care/state/texas, publishing monthly electronic e-briefs, and regular postings on our facebook, google+, linkedin and twitter accounts. This initiative also includes providing information at a literacy level appropriate for specific audiences using best practices that promote health literacy and culturally appropriate community-based prevention strategies. To expand collaborations and communication among dental and other health professionals and key stakeholders, txohc is largely responsible for these communications for the state. Txohc develops resource fact sheets for health providers and oral health educational materials for the public. We also provide oral health educational presentations via video conferencing.

the texas perinatal oral health program targets low-income perinatal women. This program seeks to address three specific oral health behaviors, oral hygiene, a helthy oral health diet, and dental attendance. Participants of this program will be given a set of three onesies for their baby. Each onesie is printed with an oral health message directed at age-specific oral health behaviors corresponding to the size of the onesie (6 months, 12 months and 18 months). In order to measure outcomes, program participants agree to accept 6-8 text survey questions during the 24 months they are enrolled in this program. In 2015, the education materials, sign-up sheets and survey questions were developed. Perinatal programs and chc's to partner with were established in san marcos, corpus christi and houston and the oral health education presenters and participant recruiters were identified. Material vendors were selected, but the orders and dissemination of gift bags were not completed until 2016. In 2017, we revised the program materials to include everything in spanish and expanded the project to include nurse family partnership agencies in dallas, tyler, and corpus christi.