National oral health objectives for the year 2000

The recent Institute of Medicine report on the future of public health is stimulating widespread discussion of the appropriate scope, direction, and means of ensuring the nation's health through public health efforts. Concurrently, the nation is in the process of establishing national disease prevention and health promotion objectives for the year 2000. This is a natural progression from the broad health promotion and disease prevention activities of the past, the 1990 Health Objectives for the Nation, and the Model Standards for Community Preventive Health Services. It is timely for North Carolina, as it celebrates past accomplishments of the state dental public health program, to consider alternative approaches to planning for the public's oral health. The year 2000 process, a national grass-roots initiative, may be a useful model for individual states to adopt. Beyond identifying specific oral health concerns, the year 2000 process offers a number of functional values: the opportunity to educate a wide audience, prioritization of state oral health concerns, identification of gaps in current programs and surveillance, and the opportunity to create an effective constituency among those individuals and institutions in the best position to bring about change.