Why medical-dental collaboration should start with education

That oral health is tied to diabetes, cardiovascular disease and dementia will not be news to anyone reading this page. The evidence has been accumulating for two decades. The real puzzle is why so little of it shows up in everyday practice.

The stock answers are policy and money. The system is fragmented; nobody reimburses collaboration. Both are true, and neither is sufficient. Plenty of fields got the policy first and the practice never followed. A few went the other way: working clinicians changed the standard, and the rules caught up later.

Watching this from both the chair and the boardroom, I think the bottleneck sits earlier in the pipe. Almost no one is systematically taught the craft of reading systemic risk in an oral finding, or what to do next, and with whom. The knowledge exists as papers. It does not exist as a routine a clinician can run in tomorrow morning's clinic, and things that are not routines do not survive contact with a busy schedule.

There is a second reason to start with education: it can be measured. Assessment before and after a course. Referral behavior. Whether a method is still in use at a clinic six months later. We publish the pilot's learning outcomes and open the data to faculty co-analysis because that loop, taught, then measured, then corrected, is the whole point.

None of this dismisses policy work. It is a question of order. Teach it, measure it, then walk into the ministry with results instead of slides. That is why we call ourselves an implementation hub rather than a school.