International Oral Care: a proposed model for the humanitarian dental missions

The creation of a good "field hospital" operating in the humanitarian missions has ever been the main aim to reach in any humanitarian missions. The Authors want to propose a model for all the humanitarian dental missions, so to standardize the activities and to make the results predictable in all the missions: this model has been named "International Oral Care" project. In the light of the experiences in the previous humanitarian missions, we have developed and standardized a protocol that provides a complex organizational planning for each phase of the mission. Our strengths are the "Dental-Marquee", the"Dental-Ambulance", the "Dental-Roulotte" and a well-tested operative workflow. In the last 3 years of activity on the field, International Oral Care has achieved an increase of treated patients, certainly consequential to the increase of operators on the field, but also due to the optimization of internal processes and the improvement of organizational structures. IOC has achieved in recent years an organization optimized and highly predictable: this makes it a model for humanitarian missions in the field of dentistry, a model that could be adopted also by international NGOs operating in war zones, or in the major natural disasters.