Sir, we write to campaign a service-learning initiative developed by undergraduate students of the ‘Division of Dentistry' at The University of Manchester, and its positive impact on diverse communities within the Greater Manchester area.

Manchester Paediatric Dentistry Student Society (MPDSS) was established in 2020 as a consultant-supervised, student-led society with the aim of giving students early exposure to paediatric dentistry and the chance to develop specific communication skills within the above context.

We developed our ‘Dentists in Primary Schools' (DiPS) project as we recognised the high caries incidence nationally in children aged five years old. Nearly one third of five-year old children in England have experienced dentinal decay, and since the North-West has the highest prevalence nationally (38.7%), we endeavoured to address this at an early stage.1

We believe that early intervention is key, which is why our core demographic comprise Key Stage 1 children. We encourage positive oral health behaviours and promote important oral hygiene messages within our DiPS sessions, such as the importance of toothbrushing and the effects of sugars in diet, all of which are delivered through the medium of play.

We also recognised that higher dentinal decay levels have been found amongst five-year old children living in the most deprived areas of the country.1 Hence, one of our key objectives with DiPS is to increase accessibility to high-quality oral health education, across Greater Manchester, for primary schools with limited budgets and resources.

To date, we have reached over 700 children across seven schools in Greater Manchester, which has been made possible with the help of our volunteers, comprising over 100 dental and dental hygiene students. Since its conception, interest from local primary schools in DiPS has continued to grow annually; with further support and additional resources, we anticipate the project's reach would certainly widen.

The feedback we have received from all parties involved has been overwhelmingly positive. All the schools that we have partnered with have welcomed us to visit them again and expressed how much the children enjoy the sessions. With each year, we have had a growing number of volunteers who find the sessions enjoyable to deliver and beneficial to learn from. This arrangement brings out the best of service learning by giving dental students an opportunity to build on the paediatric dentistry teaching received at university, all whilst providing for our local communities.

We are hoping to expand the reach of our project as the need for such interventions exists beyond our local community. We will be undertaking our project in Kenya this summer break, as ‘DiPS International: The Kenyan Project'. We are adapting and tailoring the DiPS project for Kenyan primary schools, where the prevalence of untreated caries of primary teeth in children aged between one and nine years old is 44.9%.2

We will be working with a local non-profit organisation called ‘The Rahul Kotak Foundation' to help liaise with potential primary schools and recruit local volunteers to help deliver these sessions.

Notable benefits gained by the student body from engaging with and organising community-based projects, such as DiPS include:

  • Developing skills to communicate oral health messages to children

  • Improving their management of children's behaviour

  • Learning how to budget and how to correctly risk assess when planning a project

  • Understanding and applying the use of evidence-based approaches and guidelines to create resources, as well as ensure appropriate information delivery.

It is also important to mention how being involved in such projects can positively and valuably impact an individual's wellbeing. Whilst helping to deliver educational oral health sessions to primary school pupils, volunteers are concurrently able to work together, network with, and befriend one another.

Service-learning initiatives create a needed, mutually-beneficial bridge between undergraduate students and their local communities; through our experience, we have found that appropriate guidance about service learning and promotion of it by faculty can encourage undergraduate dental students to engage with their local communities, improve understanding of their needs, and ultimately collaborate with them to coproduce and address these needs.

R. Lee, S. Chohan, A. Panchmatia, E. Deligianni and S. Barry, University of Manchester