HABIT—an early phase study to explore an oral health intervention delivered by health visitors to parents with young children aged 9–12 months: study protocol

Abstract

Parental supervised brushing (PSB) when initiated in infancy can lead to long-term protective home-based oral health habits thereby reducing the risk of dental caries. However, PSB is a complex behaviour with many barriers reported by parents hindering its effective implementation. Within the UK, oral health advice is delivered universally to parents by health visitors and their wider teams when children are aged between 9 and 12 months. Nevertheless, there is no standardised intervention or training upon which health visitors can base this advice, and they often lack the specialised knowledge needed to help parents overcome barriers to performing PSB and limiting sugary foods and drinks.

Working with health visitors and parents of children aged 9–24 months, we have co-designed oral health training and resources (Health Visitors delivering Advice in Britain on Infant Toothbrushing (HABIT) intervention) to be used by health visitors and their wider teams when providing parents of children aged 9–12 months with oral health advice.

The aim of the study is to explore the acceptability of the HABIT intervention to parents and health visitors, to examine the mechanism of action and develop suitable objective measures of PSB.

Metadata

Authors/Creators:

Eskyte, I
Gray-Burrows, K
Owen, J
Sykes-Muskett, B
Zoltie, T
Gill, S
Smith, V
McEachen, R
Marshman, Z
West, R https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7305-3654
Pavitt, S
Day, P https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9711-9638

© The Author(s). 2018 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

Keywords:

Parental supervised brushing; Caries; Children aged 9–12 months; Parents; Health visitors; Diet; Oral health advice; HABIT intervention; Behaviour change

Dates: