The making of a nation-wide campaign fighting the nursing caries

Although, in the Netherlands, the fight against tooth decay has been successful over the past decades, in 1994, the incidence of nursing caries made the Ivory Cross(*), the Dutch National Association for the Promotion of Oral Hygiene, decide to develop and implement a campaign to address the phenomenon. The campaign is based on a two-step approach: a community strategy that exposes both the intermediaries and the target group to the message. It mainly focussed on intermediaries (step 1) such as child health clinic teams and care attendants, aiming to motivate and enable them to address the topic in their communication with parents of children aged 0-4 years (step 2). The development of this campaign lasted for about 1.5 years and will be described along the lines of the OPUS model: Orientation, Planning, execUtion and cloSure. The campaign was continuously assessed by means of research consisting of a pretest of materials, and a process and outcome evaluation. The research results gave the organisers a lot of information to monitor the campaign and useful insights for future activities.