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The Inter-professional Oral Health Faculty Toolkit, developed by the Oral Health Nursing Education and Practice program, is now available.The toolkit is an innovative web-based open source product intended to facilitate integration of oral-systemic health content and clinical competencies into nurse practitioner and midwifery curricula. 

The National Nework for Oral Health Access has developed a user’s guide that provides a structure, options, and suggestions to help Health Centers develop programs to implement oral health competencies that integrate oral health care into primary care practice, which increases access to oral health care and improves the oral health status of the populations Health Centers serve.

An estimated 1.1 million people in the USA are living with HIV/AIDS.  Nearly 200,000 of these individuals do not know that they are infected.  In 2006, the CDC recommended that all healthcare providers routinely offer HIV screening to adolescent and adult patients.  Nurse-dentist collaborations present unique opportunities to provide rapid oral HIV screening to patients in dental clinic settings and reach the many adults who lack primary medical providers.  However, little is known about the feasibility and acceptability of this type of innovative practice. Thus, elicitation research was undertaken with dental providers, students, and patients. This paper reports the results of qualitative interviews with 19 adults attending a university-based dental clinic in New York City. Overall, patients held very positive attitudes and beliefs toward HIV screening in dental sites and identified important factors that should be incorporated into the design of nurse-dentist collaborative HIV screening programs.

The World Health Organization (WHO) “World Oral Health Report 2003” emphasized that despite great improvements in the oral health status of populations across the world, problems persist. As knowledge is a major vehicle for improving the health of the poor in particular, the WHO Oral Health Programme focuses on stimulating oral health esearch in the developed and developing world to reduce risk factors and the burden of oral disease, and to improve oral health ystems and the effectiveness of community oral health programmes.