Overview and Scope:

The prevalence of chronic diseases specifically diabetes are found to be higher in Latino communities. The complications of diabetes are retinopathy, neuropathy, nephropathy, and oral lesions.  The perception of commonness of diabetes and lack of knowledge about its relation with oral health among Latino communities are the primary contributing factor for poor oral hygiene. The unavailability of culturally competent oral health programs to target the diabetic Latino communities iterates the delivery of oral health programs to create and to improve the awareness rate of Latino communities.

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We designed a program to analyze the health beliefs of Latino communities. The program is based on the health belief model to learn the attitudes, intentions, perception of Latinos and also the barriers in accessing the resource. The health belief model emphasizes that "more educational activities, altered attitude, perception and hence modified health beliefs and practices. The construct of health belief model: perceived susceptibility, threat, and perceived seriousness to evaluate the effectiveness of the oral health initiative program.

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Goals:

• To analyze the oral health literacy rate of Latino Communities.

• To evaluate the attitudes, intentions, perceptions, knowledge, behavior and environmental influence of participants in initiating oral hygiene.

• To Evaluate the impact of our oral health initiative programs. I collaborated with the Latino Health Insurance program of Framingham to deliver oral health awareness for the diabetic individuals of the Latino communities in Framingham, MA. I worked along with the community worker to recruit participants from the self-weight management program. 
   

We developed questionnaires to evaluate the need for oral health services for the Latino communities. The pre-survey questionnaire will analyze the barriers in accessing resources and their knowledge of their oral health behaviors. Our analysis showed that there is a high need for oral health services due to the higher prevalence rate of diabetes and lowered awareness rate of the relation between oral health and diabetes. A simple random technique was used to enroll the program participants who are in similar age groups, ethnic background, and with similar oral hygiene status. The program participants have moderate to severe gingivitis with a pocket depth of four to six millimeters. The post-survey questionnaires' will measure the program participants' change in intention and attitudes to evaluate the impact and effectiveness of oral health programs.  Our stakeholders are dental providers, dental specialty partners, Atlantis dental, local health departments, insurance providers such as care-credit, and health care translator.

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An eight-week educational session was conducted to educate the importance of maintaining oral health. Each session runs for about one hour which comprises of education sessions for 45 minutes which is then followed with preventive services. A bilingual educational session in Spanish and English was provided and the dental hygienist from the mobile dental service from the MA Dept of public health delivered oral prophylaxis, preventive fluoride therapies, oral examinations. The educational sessions include resources of the available oral health programs in community clinics, information of the dental providers in the communities, insurance providers, and process of enrollment, and home measures for attaining good oral hygiene. We evaluated the oral health status of our program participants after the completion of our educational sessions after three months. to evaluate the oral health status of the program participants, and to determine the oral health literacy rate of Latino communities.  The evaluation revealed that the oral health of our program participants improved significantly as we noticed a reduction in pocket depth and inflammation of the gingiva and thus our organization showed that our service to the community members created a substantial impact in creating awareness of the importance of maintaining oral health.

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