Guidance

Accessible alternative text for flowcharts

Published 30 September 2021

Applies to England

Oral health survey of 5 year old children 2021 to 2022: national protocol

Flow-chart for Appendix E: Stages in the National Dental Epidemiology Programme

This gives an overview of the steps in the dental survey. Steps are colour coded blue if undertaken by national and regional dental public health teams, pink if undertaken by fieldwork teams and white if undertaken by dental epidemiology coordinators.

1. A letter is sent from the national lead for dental public health to local authority directors of public health telling them about the survey and what is the survey population.

2. The directors of public health cascade this information to directors of children services in local authorities and head teachers to gain support for the survey.

3. Consultants in dental public health at regional level support commissioning of the survey and agree local sample sizes with local authorities and NHS England and Improvement.

4. Regional consultants in dental public health discuss sampling with their local dental epidemiology coordinator if additional sampling is requested in a local authority.

5. Fieldwork teams are trained and calibrated for the survey at regional events.

6. The fieldwork teams get lists of the numbers of children by age attending mainstream schools from local authorities.

7. Using these lists, the fieldwork teams sample the schools to take part in the survey and the sampling is checked and confirmed by the local dental epidemiology coordinator.

8. Sampled schools are contacted by the fieldwork teams to take part in the survey and the children in the school are sampled.

9. Information letters requesting agreement to participate in the survey are sent to the parents and people with parental responsibility of the selected children.

10. Information about the children is sought from the school or parents including home postcode, sex and ethnic group.

11. Lists of children to be examined are drawn up and all children present in the school on the day of examination for whom agreement to participate has been received are examined.

12. All the data collected are entered into a computer and checked for errors. They are then sent securely to the local dental epidemiology coordinator.

Training and calibration guide for oral health surveys of children

Flow-chart for Overview of survey training and calibration

This gives an overview of the steps in running a training and calibration event as part of a dental survey.

1. Approach local schools where the training and calibration event can be held and agree dates with the schools for the events.

2. Send out agreement to participate information to parents and people with parental responsibility of children of the required age.

3. Go into the school and select children suitable for the training and calibration event.

4. Send out details of the training and calibration event to local fieldwork teams who will be undertaking the survey.

5. If there are any new examiners, provide pre-training on the theory and the dental caries (decay) training slide pack.

6. Hold the training event for all examiners and recorders using the national training slide sets.

7. Hold the calibration event for all examiners and their recorders, to include training rounds and the calibration rounds.

8. Analyse the data from the calibration rounds with the local dental epidemiology coordinator and send the results to the dental epidemiology coordinator to check and confirm these.

9. The local dental epidemiology coordinator will then inform the examiners of the outcomes of the calibration exercise. Additional training and calibration may need to be arranged if anyone fails to calibrate.