Making Every Contact Count

Making Every Contact Count supports P 3.3. For dental nurses this means providing consistent, evidence-based prevention support within your professional scope and using local systems to escalate or hand over when needed.

Health promotion in practice goes beyond handing out leaflets. Delivering Better Oral Health and NICE guidance recommend routine, evidence-informed prevention messages, support for behaviour change, and consistent oral health promotion in dental settings.

What to notice in practice

• Brief advice: ask what the patient or colleague needs next, then hand over or escalate clearly.
• Smoking: keep advice evidence-based, consistent and realistic for the patient.
• Diet: keep advice evidence-based, consistent and realistic for the patient.
• Fluoride: keep advice evidence-based, consistent and realistic for the patient.
• Oral hygiene: keep advice evidence-based, consistent and realistic for the patient.

Dental nurses can reinforce prevention messages, make advice understandable, and identify when recommendations are not realistic for a patient. They should also report when practice systems hinder preventive care.

Good practice is practical and visible: prepare, listen, check understanding, hand over clearly, and raise recurring problems so they can be addressed at team or system level. These actions put the SPF outcome into everyday practice.

Research and system context

Health promotion delivers health gain when advice is evidence-based, realistic, repeated consistently and accessible to the patient.