Improving oral care for hospitalised patients: choosing appropriate products

Oral care is a fundamental part of nursing but it is often performed as a routine task, often based on historic practice, and lacks an evidence base. A variety of oral care products are used in practice.

To discover evidence of effective oral care products for use in hospitalised patients.

A systematic literature review was undertaken.

A review of articles was conducted using CINAHL, PubMed, the Cochrane Database and Google Scholar between 2007 and 2019. All articles were compared and contrasted and some excluded due to the quality of the evidence.

The literature review identified a number of oral care problems and investigated a range of products.

The main finding was that there is a need for a definitive, evidence-based oral care guideline on the products suitable for different oral care conditions, including dysphagia, xerostomia, mucositis, and for patients wearing dentures.