Volunteering can be both a personally and professionally rewarding way to make use of our dental skills and knowledge. Through the Health Education England Team Up initiative, our group of five (including foundation dentists, an academic clinical fellow in special care dentistry and psychiatry core trainee) delivered a comprehensive oral health promotion education package to care workers who provide support to residents living within East Thames housing charity.

Team Up is a London-wide volunteer programme that links together willing medical and dental trainees and other healthcare professionals with charitable organisations that are seeking creative and novel ways to improve health outcomes for vulnerable members of society. These initiatives may include health promotion, improving communication, enabling access to care and a whole range of other projects.

The Smile Project team with their poster at the Team Up celebration event in May 2017

The aim of our Smile project was three fold: (1) to educate lead staff working with people residing in East Thames housing charity about oral health and its importance for general health; (2) to integrate dentistry as a health priority in each of the East Thames sites by developing a 'red flag' poster for urgent dental issues and by providing information on access to local services; and (3) translation of knowledge by tiered dissemination of the oral health education programme to all care workers at each site. Lead care workers were tasked with disseminating oral health knowledge to other staff and residents as well as undertaking a yearly oral health update. Oral health knowledge was measured by a pre- and post-teaching questionnaire that showed an increase in oral health knowledge score from 4 prior to the session to 13 (out of a maximum score of 14) once the teaching had been delivered.

After the completion of the projects there was a Team Up celebration event that gave all of the 2016/2017 volunteers an opportunity to showcase their projects through the presentation of a poster and to share their experiences with one another.

The project was inspiring, fun to organise and was a wonderful opportunity to work collaboratively with colleagues and with a charity to develop a useful initiative that will hopefully help to improve oral health for residents of East Thames into the future. The Team Up experience offers the opportunity to work with people in the community and helps trainees to develop an understanding of the role and operation of third sector organisations and to gain experience in project management. We would highly recommend the experience and encourage other young dentists to volunteer. For more information about getting involved visit the Team Up webpage at: http://www.lpmde.ac.uk/training-programme/specialty-schools/public-health/teamup.