CDA Essentials 2019 • Volume 6 • Issue 7

23 Issue 7 | 2019 | N ews and E vents Dr. Paul Allison joined The Lancet’ s ten-country team that created this series of articles and he talked with CDA Essentials about the series’ key findings and what he believes should be next for oral health policy in Canada. Q: Why is The Lancet Oral Health Series so important at this time? Dr. Paul Allison (PA): It’s really the system we have to think about. There’s a big debate going on in the world at the moment about universal health care. And the authors of the series strongly believe that dentistry has to be part of universal health care. Dentistry has to stop being siloed out on the side, but rather should be part of mainstream health care. Q: What are the series’ key findings and messages? PA: While much of what we said in the articles is fairly well known in the dental community, it’s not well known in the general medical and health care community. So we were very much speaking to the broader health care/health policy community across the globe with these articles and wanted to make it very clear that dental disease is very common. The epidemiological evidence indicates that dental decay is the most common non-communicable disease on the planet. And that fact, I think, was news to many—certainly to the editorial team at The Lancet and I think it’s also news to many Lancet readers. Q: Do you expect the series to stir debate? PA: We want this to be widely read and to promote debate about how we should move things forward. This is a very complex situation, but I think we really do have to start thinking about how the profession needs to change things, looking at issues like how much influence the sugar industry has on the dental industry writ large across the globe. For instance, are there conflict of interest issues that we can change, to make sure that we’re explicit on how we’re dealing with the sugar industry. Credit:TheLancet