100 Million Mouths Campaign: Creating a Pilot Program to Advance Oral Health Equity

More individuals access primary care compared with oral health services. Enhancing primary care training to include oral health content can therefore improve access to care for millions of individuals and improve health equity. We developed the 100 Million Mouths Campaign (100MMC), which aims to create 50 state oral health education champions (OHECs) who will work with primary care training programs to integrate oral health into their curricula.

In 2020-2021, we recruited and trained OHECs from 6 pilot states (Alabama, Delaware, Iowa, Hawaii, Missouri, and Tennessee) with representation from varied disciplines and specialties. The training program consisted of 4-hour workshops over 2 days followed by monthly meetings. We conducted internal and external evaluations to assess the program's implementation through postworkshop surveys, identifying process and outcome measures for engagement of primary care programs, and through focus groups and key informant interviews with the OHECs.

The results of the postworkshop survey indicated that all 6 OHECs found the sessions helpful in planning next steps as a statewide OHEC. Each OHEC was also successful in engaging 3 primary care training programs within their state and incorporating oral health curricular content through various modalities, including lectures, clinical practice, and case presentations. During the year-end interviews, the OHECs reported that they would overwhelmingly recommend this program to future state OHECs.

The 100MMC pilot program was implemented successfully, and the newly trained OHECs have the potential to improve access to oral health within their communities. Future program expansion needs to prioritize diversity within the OHEC community and focus on program sustainability.