The WFPHA Oral Health Working Group

Nearly half the world lives with oral disease: an estimated 3.7 billion people, according to the World Health Organization. Most of it is preventable. Yet oral health is still missing from many plans, budgets, and programs designed to protect people’s health. The WFPHA Oral Health Working Group exists to close that gap.

A young woman with curly hair smiles widely smiling

What is public oral health?

Public oral health looks beyond the dental chair. It asks why oral disease clusters in some communities and not others, and it works at the population level to prevent disease, promote oral health, and ensure people can get care when they need it. It treats the mouth as part of the body: oral diseases share causes with heart disease, diabetes, and cancer, and income, food environments, commercial practices, and health system organization shape them.

Why oral health matters to public health?

  • Oral diseases are the most common noncommunicable diseases in the world, affecting an estimated 3.7 billion people.
  • Sugar, tobacco and alcohol drive oral disease as well as cancer, heart disease and diabetes. Acting on one strengthens action on the others.
  • Pain and tooth loss affect what people can eat, how they speak, whether children can learn and whether adults can work.
  • The heaviest burden falls on people with low incomes, Indigenous peoples, and communities with the least access to prevention and care.
  • In many countries, oral care sits outside UHC and is paid for out of pocket. Bringing it into primary care, maternal and child health, schools, and NCD programs reaches people who may never see a dentist.

Aims of the WFPHA Oral Health Working Group

Our work supports the WHO Global Strategy and Action Plan on Oral Health 2023–2030, which commits countries to UHC for oral health by 2030. We aim to:

  • Making oral health part of primary health care, UHC, and national NCD strategies.
  • Protecting oral health from the start of life through maternal, child, and school-based programs.
  • Strengthening the oral health workforce, including non-dental health workers who can prevent disease and refer early.
  • Producing practical evidence (casebooks, reviews, surveys and tools) that policymakers and practitioners can use.
  • Bringing voices from the Global South and Indigenous communities into setting the global oral health agenda.
  • Addressing the social and commercial determinants of oral health and promoting policies that reduce oral health inequities.

    How we work

    • Drafting policy statements and position papers for WFPHA adoption.
    • Documenting what works in real programs through casebooks, reviews and surveys.
    • Partnering with other WFPHA Working Groups, especially NCDs and Tobacco Control, and with WHO, the FDI World Dental Federation, the International Federation of Dental Hygienists, universities and civil society.
    • Taking evidence to global forums, including the World Congress on Public Health, Global Public Health Week and the UN General Assembly.
    • Reaching wider audiences through webinars, podcasts and blogs

    Our Work

    Responding to the pandemic (2021–2022)

    By 2021, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Working Group had grown to 24 members from 13 countries, organized into two subgroups that met monthly: one on maternal oral health and one on mobile oral health (mOral health). That year we gave collective feedback on the draft WHO Global Oral Health Strategy. The mOral health subgroup aligned its work with the new WHO implementation guide on mobile technologies for oral health and built a tool to judge the quality of mobile and online oral health resources for the public and non-dental professionals. In 2022, we published a WFPHA policy resolution on primary dental care during the COVID-19 pandemic and presented our work at the European Public Health Conference.

    Maternal and child oral health initiative (2021–2023)

    In collaboration with the WFPHA Women, Children and Adolescents (WCA) Working Group and national public health associations, members of the Oral Health Working Group launched the WFPHA Global Maternal and Child Oral Health Initiative at the World Congress on Public Health in Rome in 2023. The initiative received more than 50 endorsements from international and national public health organizations, including ministries of health, and was adopted as official WFPHA policy. The initiative also supported maternal and child oral health activities in members’ countries, including oral health education for pregnant women and new mothers in Tanzania and Malaysia; training for midwives and dental providers in Indonesia; tobacco cessation support for pregnant women in India; and care for refugee and immigrant women in Switzerland. The Working Group also advised on maternal oral health policy and practice in South Africa, India, Serbia, Nigeria and the Cook Islands, and published a maternal oral health framework and policy brief in the Journal of Public Health Policy. The initiative was subsequently selected as a case study for a WFPHA public health casebook.

    Schools and communities (2024)

    From mothers and infants, we followed children into school. Our 2024 Global School Oral Health Casebook tells the stories of eight programs in Armenia, Brazil, Canada, the Cook Islands, Indonesia, Scotland, South Africa and Tonga. It shows what makes them work (prevention, respect for local culture, community engagement, cross-sector partnership, and steady policy support) and what holds them back: unstable funding and children out of school.

    Health systems, workforce and primary care (2023–2024)

    We also turned to the health systems that decide whether oral care reaches people at all. With the International Federation of Dental Hygienists and Seoul National University, we surveyed the global oral health workforce, and with the FDI EMR/EDR Taskforce we examined how medical, dental and social records can be linked. In 2024, WFPHA endorsed the WHO Bangkok Declaration and joined the WHO Global Oral Health Coalition.

    Promoting equitable access to fluorides (2025)

    In 2025, WFPHA endorsed a position statement supporting access to the optimal use of fluorides for oral health as a fundamental public health measure. Grounded in evidence on caries prevention and safety at recommended levels, the statement calls for comprehensive national guidelines that balance fluoride benefits with appropriate exposure management. It recognizes water fluoridation as one possible delivery method and emphasizes that national approaches should reflect local contexts, infrastructure, resources, and naturally occurring fluoride levels in water. Through this policy work, the Working Group advocates equitable access to effective and safe preventive measures, especially for communities disproportionately affected by oral diseases.

    Oral health on the NCD and UHC agenda (2025–2026)

    With the WFPHA NCD Working Group, we co-wrote the Federation’s policy statement Integrating Oral Health into the Global NCD and UHC Agendas, approved by the Governing Council in October 2025, and produced a podcast series linking oral health to cancer, tobacco, heart disease, diabetes, and mental health. That September, we took the message to UN General Assembly Week in New York, co-leading the Mouth Matters civil society event alongside the Fourth UN High-Level Meeting on NCDs. In 2026, our webinar on integrating oral health into primary care drew 412 registrants from 21 countries.

    Oral health publications and policy resources

      Key Global Reference

      World Health Organization. Global Strategy and Action Plan on Oral Health 2023–2030. Geneva: WHO; 2024.

      Oral Health Learning Resources

      Podcast: Bridging Oral Health and Noncommunicable Diseases

      A series with the WFPHA NCD Working Group, with most episodes released on a global health observance day.

      Webinar recordings

      Past Oral Health Events

      • World Congress on Public Health, Cape Town, September 2026. Oral presentation on global school models; workshop on cross-sectoral digital advocacy for integrated NCD management; panel on oral health through a Global South lens, with Solidarity Dental Foundation and Manipal College of Dental Sciences. [Global launch of the NCD and UHC policy statement and closing podcast event]
      • Mouth Matters: Civil Society Drives Health Through Oral Health, New York, 21 September 2025. Hybrid side event during UN General Assembly week, with the Alliance for Oral Health Across Borders, NYU College of Dentistry and NYU School of Global Public Health.
      • Johns Hopkins Global Oral Health Symposium, Baltimore, 2025. School oral health case studies from the Cook Islands, Indonesia, and Tonga.
      • WHO Global Oral Health Meeting, Bangkok, November 2024. WFPHA endorsed the Bangkok Declaration and joined the WHO Global Oral Health Coalition.
      • FDI World Dental Federation, Chicago, 21–23 February 2024. Findings from the survey on integrating electronic medical, dental and social records, with the FDI EMR/EDR Taskforce.
      • World Congress on Public Health, Rome, May 2023. Launch of the WFPHA Global Maternal and Child Oral Health Initiative.
      • European Public Health Conference, Berlin, November 2022. Presentation of the Working Group’s maternal and mobile oral health work.

      The WFPHA Oral Health Working Group media activity 

      Membership

      We are a volunteer network of over 20 public health professionals, dentists, dental hygienists, researchers, educators and advocates working in high-, middle- and low-income settings. Since then, we have worked to bring oral health into the places where public health decisions are made: primary health care, universal health coverage (UHC), maternal and child health, schools, and the global response to noncommunicable diseases (NCDs).

      Chair: Dr Abiola Adeniyi, public health dentist and Assistant Professor of Global Health and Human Services, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Canada

      Vice Chair: Seema Lal-Kumar, Director of Clinical Services, University of Puthisastra, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

      Senior Advisors:

      • Kenneth Eaton, Chair, Platform for Better Oral Health in Europe; Council of European Chief Dental Officers, United Kingdom
      • Hyewon Lee, Director, Seoul National University Global Maternal and Child Oral Health Center, South Korea
      • Leonie Short,  Director, Seniors Dental Care Australia, Australia
      • Myron Allukian Jr., Former President, American Public Health Association, USA

      Past leadership: Raman Bedi (Chair, [2014-2021]); Hyewon Lee (Chair, [2021-2025]); Kenneth Eaton and Myron Allukian Jr. (Vice Chairs, [2014-2021]); Sophia Thomas (Vice Chair, [2023-2024]); Abiola Adeniyi (Vice Chair, 2023–2025); Kiran P. Nagdeo (Vice Chair, [2023-2025])

      We meet online every two months and welcome public health associations, oral health professionals, researchers, educators, students, policymakers, and civil society organizations. You can:

      • Share a program from your country for our casebook on integrated oral health delivery.
      • Suggest a speaker or co-host a webinar for Global Public Health Week.
      • Join a writing team for a review, commentary, or policy statement.
      • Use our NCD and UHC Call to Action to bring oral health into your association’s advocacy.

      Contact: Dr. Abiola Adeniyi, Chair, a.adeniyi@fdu.edu