@article{fc6a54f92dfb4c198847d8802e31890b,
title = "Measuring oral health—How can the International Classification of Functioning help?",
abstract = "There is a need for a theoretically informed, contextualized approach to measuring oral health from a multidisciplinary perspective that goes beyond the commonly used clinical indices and sociodental measures. This commentary aims to discuss the potential for the WHO's International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) to provide a model for the development of indicators for oral health. It is suggested that the ICF might provide both a theoretical model and an operational classification for indicators of oral health. The ICF model states that human experience of physical, cognitive and social functioning is universal and, thus, can be described and qualified. Human function is given social and environmental context within the model at both an individual and population level. The ICF can not only capture data regarding oral health and function at the physiological level (e.g. chewing) but also at the social level (e.g. sharing meals). It is able not only to capture aspects of preventive behaviour (e.g. caring for teeth) but also aspects of social facilitation (e.g. economic self-sufficiency) or ability to fulfil a social role (e.g. remunerative employment). It also includes aspects of social environment, such as healthcare services or political, economic and legal systems. Case studies are given as examples of the potential use of the ICF in the oral health domain. Examples are also given of the first steps that have been made towards operationalization of the ICF in data collection and oral health research. The challenges of encompassing such a comprehensive model into a practical oral health measure are discussed.",
author = "Denise Faulks and Sasha Scambler and Bl{\'a}naid Daly and Lisa Jamieson and Martine Hennequin and Georgios Tsakos",
note = "Funding Information: INTRODUCTION , the European Global Oral Health Indicators Development Project (EGOHID), the EU project ADVOCATE ** and a current project led by the WHO HQ Geneva Oral Health Programme and supported by the WHO Collaborating Centre for Oral Health Inequalities and Public Health at UCL, London. The most widely used epidemiological tool in oral health has traditionally been the WHO oral health surveys, but this has not been updated since 2013 and remains a largely clinical set of measures of dental diseases. The epidemiological tradition of recording caries prevalence as the main indicator of oral health in large national or regional surveys is increasingly being questioned and gradually abandoned, as the limits and costs of such an approach are recognized. It is now widely recognized that the concept of oral health cannot be reduced to the measurement of disease. The lack of appropriate tools for the measurement of oral health is particularly obvious in the study of inequalities in oral health. Marginalized populations that represent the extreme aspects of inequalities are, by definition, hard to reach and often explicitly excluded from epidemiology and research. Despite agreement that epidemiology is essential in order to identify oral health differences between different groups, with the overarching aim to act upon them, there is unresolved debate over what should be measured and how to capture the essential elements of whole population health. In particular, the data collected need to be easy to interpret and easy to integrate into health policy decision‐making. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2022 John Wiley & Sons A/S. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd",
year = "2022",
month = feb,
day = "2",
doi = "10.1111/cdoe.12732",
language = "English",
journal = "Community Dentistry and Oral Epidemiology",
issn = "0301-5661",
publisher = "Blackwell Munksgaard",
}