ABSTRACT
An adequate income for everyone is beyond the control and influence of health workers, but would have a major impact on public health. Even modest gains spread over a large population can have immense health gains for society and individuals. Individual efforts to give advice on smoking cessation targeted at health service users need to be coupled with population-directed health promotion activities. These include Government measures such as taxation, control of sales, health warnings, control of advertising, funding for health promotion and smoking cessation programmes that involve healthcare providers. The effectiveness of an intervention may be judged in terms of its potential to deliver health gain. The Oral Health Index was developed in the early 1990s and was based on the Oral Health Strategy Group’s definition quoted earlier. The oral health score has been modified to simplify the calculation of the final index, which includes eight components.
