Oral Health Promotion Among Preschool Children With Special Needs

Summary

Establishing good oral health-related habit is challenging among younger children, especially for preschool children with special needs, as they have physical, mental, sensory, behavioural, emotional, and chronic medical conditions that requires health care beyond the routines. Existing evidences showed that children with special needs have poorer oral health status and more challenging behaviours than their counterparts in main stream schools. Visual pedagogy, such as social stories, have been applied to teach a variety of skills or behaviours to individuals with special needs. They are short stories demonstrating the target skill or behaviour, and then the readers are expected to perform the target skill or behaviour following the demonstrations. Giving the evidence that children with special needs can understand complex situations and learn new practices by using those stories, we expect to apply a package of structured social stories to modify oral health-related behaviours (tooth brushing, healthy eating, dental visit), and thereby, improve oral health status among preschool children with special needs. Establishment of good oral-health related behaviours in early childhood will benefits children in their future life. Additionally, visual pedagogy-assisted oral health education is relatively easy and safe to implement. If proven effective, social story-based preventive care can be recommended to special children globally.

Conditions

• Intellectual Disability
• Cerebral Palsy
• Developmental Disorders
• Developmental Delay
• Autistic Spectrum Disorders
• Down Syndrome
• Epilepsy
• Developmental Disability
• Learning Disorders

Interventions

OTHER

Visual pedagogy (social stories)

Oral health instruction, tooth-brushing training (toothbrushes and fluoridated toothpastes provided)

OTHER

Conventional leaflets

Oral health instruction, tooth-brushing training (toothbrushes and fluoridated toothpastes provided)

Sponsors & Collaborators

• The University of Hong Kong

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Hai Ming Wong, PhD · Dental Faculty, The University of Hong Kong

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

PREVENTION

Masking

DOUBLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

2 Years

Max Age

6 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2016-04-12

Primary Completion

2018-09-28

Completion

2018-09-30

Countries

• China

Study Locations