Bringing Research to the Community
Addressing Inequalities in Nontraditional Settings
Michelle Henshaw, associate professor and assistant dean for community partnerships and extramural affairs in the Goldman School of Dental Medicine, has also set a national example. Her outreach brings dental care and education to the Boston-area schoolchildren who need it most. Henshaw is the deputy director of the Center for Research to Evaluate and Eliminate Dental Disparities (CREEDD). The center was created in 2001 with joint funding from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research and the National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities and is one of five NIH-funded programs to reduce oral health disparity. What makes CREEDD innovative, according to Henshaw, is not only its creation of new models of research, but also the implementation of these models in nontraditional settings.
Michelle Henshaw, deputy director of the Center for Research to Evaluate and Eliminate Dental Disparities, estimates that more than one in five children in the Greater Boston area have untreated dental decay—a statistic she hopes to change through her work with Smart Smiles and the Chelsea Dental Program.
One of the most recent components of CREEDD's research is a partnership with New England Research Institutes (NERI) to complete an oral health survey of 10,000 children in kindergarten, third, and sixth grades in Massachusetts, a one-year project that Henshaw hopes will be funded every three to five years so that the data can be updated. “The survey is a means to an end,” she says, with the ultimate goal being the reduction of dental health disparity and the building of a new partnership with the community. Henshaw and her colleagues also expect that “the oral health survey will allow us to make more informed public policy decisions.”
In addition to her work surveying and assessing the state of dental care, Henshaw helps the Massachusetts community through Smart Smiles, a Boston citywide sealant program, and through the continued partnership between Boston University and the Chelsea Dental Program to offer education, dental screening, and referrals to children in the Chelsea area. First formed in 1991, the program has grown over the past 16 years and includes dental sealant programs, fluoride varnish applications, and oral health education to help treat and prevent dental decay.
Both partnerships are founded on the understanding that dental health is an important prerequisite to learning: a child in pain from a cavity is a child who will have a difficult time listening and taking in the day's lesson. CREEDD's research has revealed that 21 percent of children in the Greater Boston area have dental decay, with an even higher percentage of untreated decay in the city itself. Again, dental health has larger implications for students' lives than it might first appear. Part of what CREEDD is doing, Henshaw says, is looking at the clinical burden of tooth decay in order to "measure the impact on the overall health of the family."
For more information on CREEDD, see http://creedd.org/henshaw.html; for Smart Smiles, visit www.boston.k12.ma.us/Pashaw/2004-05/dental.htm.
