Helping the European Association of Dental Public Health extend its reach
The European Association of Dental Public Health, founded in 1996, provides an international and independent science-based forum for professionals having a special interest in dental public health and community dentistry. In 2010 the Foundation provided a modest grant to EADPH, since when our collaboration has continued. The EADPH Board has widely acknowledged that our contribution has made a significant impact on the organisation’s development. The success of this collaboration has also been hugely beneficial to the Foundation, helping to extend our links and raise our profile across Europe and beyond.
Our initial assistance gave a boost to EADPH’s travel grant scheme; we effectively extended the reach by each year sponsoring ten researchers to participate and present their posters on any aspect of dental public health at the Association's annual scientific congress. The grants have always been awarded on merit by the EADPH, with priority given to applicants who work in Europe’s lower-income countries. More recently we raised the number of grants to twelve.
Also, in 2010 we began to provide EADPH membership subsidy to individuals engaged in dental public health, again in the lower-income countries, in another scheme that has proved successful. The Foundation offers 100 of these grants each year, and to date, they have been taken up in 18 countries, many of which were previously un- or under-represented in the membership. This initiative helps to share ideas and models of good practice, and includes providing the members with the quarterly journal, Community Dental Health.
Over the decade we have sponsored a keynote speaker to deliver The Borrow Lecture at each of the Association’s annual scientific congresses. Speakers have come from across Europe; at the 25th EADPH congress, held in Ghent in 2019, Professor Anna Odone, Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele, Faculty of Medicine, Milan, presented a paper entitled ‘The European Public Health Association (EUPHA) vision and action on Dental public health’.
Part of the background to Professor Odone’s paper was that we had provided support to EADPH to enable it to establish a section on Prevention of Oral Diseases within the European Public Health Association (EUPHA). The new section, established during EUPHA’s 2019 Conference in Marseille, has as its aim ‘to contribute to the prevention of oral diseases in the context of better oral health and thereby addressing inequalities’.