ABSTRACT
Health promotion can only be effective if patients can access the services available. Patients may fear that refusal to consent to health promotion activities will affect the way in which dental practitioners manage the problems with which they have attended. Access to health promotion activities is often difficult for those with physical handicaps, visual or hearing impairment. Shorter- term evaluation, such as an increase in the number of people being offered health promotion activities, has often been used instead. Health professionals need to develop strategies to encourage individual action and reduce attitudes of coercion or blame. One of the five short-listed entrants in the recent Department of Health/British Dental Association Focus Award scheme was a practice which offered the services of a smoking cessation adviser as part of its wider obligations to health promotion among its patients. Dental practitioners could also consider how they could take dental health promotion to selected groups, as the community dental service has been doing.
