All pre- and primary school age children should be offered twice weekly fluoride varnishing to reduce levels of tooth decay, a Tynwald committee has recommended.

The Social Affairs Policy Review Committee is building on the work of the Oral Health Strategy, that found that over 25% of five-year-olds have experience of tooth decay.

The committee has made seven recommendations to improve children’s oral health, including that an updated implementation plan for the 2021-2026 Oral Health Strategy for Children aged up to 11 should be laid before Tynwald by the end of July 2023 and that actions should be prioritised with expected delivery dates, a note of the expected outcomes and details of how success will be measured and when it will be reported on.

It has also recommended that participation in ‘Smile of Mann’, a scheme focuses on supervised tooth-brushing to support children, should be compulsory for all of the island’s nurseries, pre-schools, and school year groups reception and Year 1, beginning no later than the September 2023 school year.

Connected to this, the committee has also recommended that twice yearly fluoride varnish applications are offered to all pre and primary school age children, also beginning no later than the September 2023 school year.

As well as education, the committee also noted that access to dental services is the lack of service provision to cope with the current volume of patients, in October 2022, for example, there were 2,086 people waiting for an NHS dentist, of which 784 were children.

This is an improvement on September 2021, when more than 2,500 people were on a waiting list to join a dental surgery.

The committee recommended that ‘Public Health should undertake a campaign targeted at parents and carers to improve information about access to dental care, and appropriate home dental care’ and calls on Manx Care to address the limited availability of access to NHS dentists, particularly for children.

Another area it seeks to address is that fear of the dentist is prevalent for children and as such it recommends that the Public Health Directorate investigate strategies to improve the dentist experience for children.

Finally, it also recommends that Manx Care continues to review options with regards to early dental registration for children.