Oral Health Education and Advocacy Programme for Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVC) – a Preliminary Retrospective Study

Targeted oral health services for orphans and vulnerable children are rarely available in our communities. Oral health education preventive  interventions present the only strategy to address this problem. In a descriptive retrospective study using the structure, process and outcome factors we evaluated oral health education and advocacy programme conducted by the Community Dentistry Unit, University of Benin Teaching Hospital, Benin City, Nigeria over 5 years to orphanages. A total of 14 visits were conducted involving 362 orphans. The number of orphans per home ranged from 12-80 children with a mean of 26 orphans while that of caregivers ranged from 2-8 persons giving ratio of caregiver to orphan of 1:8. Majority of the orphanages ( 85.7%) were private, owned and funded by personal donations while 14.3% were owned by religious organizations. Furthermore, 57.1% of the orphanages made use of rented facilities. Oral health education was carried out with equal distributions of indoor and outdoor. Only about 7.1% of the orphanages had a sickbay on-site. None of the orphanages had access to oral health and all requested for  subsequent visits. These findings support a need for orphanages to have oral health aids, functional facilities and a clear access to oral health care. Also, sustained source of funding, regular visits by oral heal health personnel, caretakers training are needed. Keywords: advocacy, oral health education, orphans, vulnerable children, Benin Cit