Public Health England (PHE) has published a suite of resources focused on promoting a healthier weight for children, young people and families. These resources are intended to support health and care professionals to be consistent and provide a core set of healthy weight messages throughout the life course. This suite of resources is part of PHE’s All Our Health ‘call to action’ for health and care professionals. Resources can be accessed HERE and include:

• Consistent messaging infographics: For use in practice. Each infographic highlights the key evidenced based healthy weight messages for specific age or target groups.
• Consistent messaging slide sets: The aim of these slides is to be used as a training tool to inform workforce development. It provides detailed evidence based healthy weight messages from preconception through to age 18 years. It includes links to a range of useful free resources including e-learning and guidance documents.
• Child obesity animation: This animation demonstrates for all health and care professionals their vital role in supporting children, young people and families to maintain a healthier weight to prevent and reduce childhood obesity, from pregnancy through to the transition to adulthood
• The national dental PHE team have worked with the child obesity team to ensure that oral health messages are embedded within infographics and training tools. This has been a lot of detailed work for PHE. Please share this information with all your staff.

Please find attached a letter on behalf of David Geddes re notice on the restrictions of use and disposal of dental amalgam. Also please find attached a copy of a letter Sara Hurley, Chief Dental Officer, England, sent to all dental registrants alerting them to the European Union Regulation 2017/852 regarding the use and disposal of mercury. Thank you.

Dental practices can adopt, encourage and facilitate active travel such as cycling and walking, to and from work, where possible. This will reduce the carbon footprint of their businesses and improve cardiovascular health as well as the general health and wellbeing of their teams. This document has now been published. It’s available at the following URL:

The attached letter attached advising of the Government’s decision on dental pay for 2018/19 omitted to mention that the amendment to the Statement of Financial Entitlement uplifting dental contracts is still subject to consultation with the British Dental Association (BDA).

In keeping with previous years, the Department of Health and Social Care will conduct the consultation and subject to the outcome of that, the BSA will then be instructed to adjust contracts and any local contracts can also be updated. No uplift is to be applied until the consultation has been completed and SFEs amended.

You may be aware that there is a rollout of NHSmail accounts to the dental profession. Each practice will have an email address against which individual practitioners can be registered. This is available for NHS and private dental practices across England, to improve data security and enable open communication between dentistry and other health and care professionals.

The service is available free to all practices and a new national portal and dedicated support team is available to help dental professionals join and use the Service. The national service is approved for clinical use and will improve data security across the profession.

Each dental practice should register for a shared practice mailbox and individual user mailboxes for each practitioner. Registration should be completed before 14 September 2018. All communications from NHS England after 1 October 2018 will be sent via NHSmail.

Further guidance is available via https://portal.nhs.net/Help or by contacting dentistadmin@nhs.net

You may be aware that there is a rollout of NHS mail accounts to the dental profession. Each practice will have an email address against which individual practitioners can be registered. This is available for NHS and private dental practices across England, to improve data security and enable open communication between dentistry and other health and care professionals.

The service is available free to all practices and a new national portal and dedicated support team is available to help dental professionals join and use the Service. The national service is approved for clinical use and will improve data security across the profession.

Each dental practice should register for a shared practice mailbox and individual user mailboxes for each practitioner. Registration should be completed before 14 September 2018. All communications from NHS England after 1 October 2018 will be sent via NHS mail.

Further guidance is available from https://portal.nhs.net/Help or by contacting dentistadmin@nhs.net

Since mid-2017, the UK has experienced a shortage of hepatitis B vaccine due to global manufacturing issues. In response, Public Health England (PHE) declared a National Enhanced Incident in August 2017 and developed temporary recommendations on hepatitis B vaccine use including risk-based prioritisation of vaccine, dose-sparing and deferral of boosters which has had an impact on the dental profession. In March 2018, as supplies were forecast to improve over the coming year, a recovery plan to support phased re-introduction of vaccines was published. Supplies have now improved as a manufacturer is confident that they have sufficient supplies of hepatitis B vaccines for the entire UK market.

In view of overall improvement in UK supply, PHE have agreed to accelerate the phased re-introduction of vaccine outlined in the recovery plan, so that vaccine is now available for all priority groups. This means that vaccines can now be ordered for all health and social care clinical and non-clinical staff and healthcare students who are at risk of blood and body fluid exposure. Some ordering restrictions will remain in place to ensure backlog or catch up vaccination can continue. Communications have been sent to NHS and non-NHS occupational health network leads.

Public Health England (PHE) has launched a new Breastfeeding Friend voice search service on Google Assistant and Google Home (attached). The 24/7 Breastfeeding Friend provides friendly advice to mothers who have questions and need support with breastfeeding at any point day or night. The Breastfeeding Friend is already available on Amazon Alexa and Facebook Messenger, and from Wednesday 1 August has been available on Google Assistant and Google Home to provide even more parents with advice and support during the first few weeks of breastfeeding. The tool is voice activated, meaning mothers can get NHS-approved advice in the moment and when they may have their hands full. Dental teams can help to promote these new tools as part of Making Every Contact Count.

The PHE Child Dental Health and Breastfeeding briefing is also attached – the key points are:

• Dental teams should continue to support and encourage mothers to breast feed
• Not being breastfed is associated with an increased risk of infectious morbidity (for example, gastroenteritis, respiratory infections, middle ear infections)
• Breastfeeding up to 12 months of age is associated with a decreased risk of tooth decay
• Exclusive breastfeeding is recommended for around the first 6 months of life. Complementary foods should be introduced from around 6 months of age alongside continued breastfeeding.
• The prevalence of breastfeeding in UK is low with 34% of mothers still breastfeeding their child at 6 months with only 1% exclusively breastfeeding
• Further advice for dental teams can be found in Health Matters: Child Dental Health, Delivering Better Oral Health (2014) and nhs.uk/start4life/breastfeeding

Please note that the Alcohol Learning Centre is no longer accessible for e-learning training and PHE would like to direct all dental teams to the free online e-learning training module: https://www.e-lfh.org.uk/programmes/alcohol/ This module is suitable for all members of the dental team to develop their knowledge and skills in delivering very brief alcohol consumption advice related to oral health

Registration is free – just scroll to the bottom of the webpage to the “Register” button.

This training module supports Section 8 Alcohol misuse and oral health of DBOH and is underpinned by The Chief Medical Officer for England guidelines on lower risk drinking.

You may be aware of the current work by the Chief Dental Officer for England and NHS England in promoting early preventive care for young children, and the ‘Dental Check by One’ campaign led by the British Society of Paediatric Dentistry. This work is part of the wider effort to reduce the large number of children being admitted to hospital for the extraction of carious teeth under general anaesthesia. The valuable work of primary care dental teams is key in supporting this ambition.

Please find attached a resource pack, developed by the Office of Chief Dental Officer, England, as part of the Starting Well Core initiative, which is intended to support the dental profession when caring for young children aged 0-2 years. It consists of both new and existing profession- and public-facing resources from a variety of sources. These include links to learning tools and materials for the dental team, current guidance for the care of pre-cooperative children, posters for dental practices, patient information leaflets and links to other patient resources. I would encourage you to use these resources in practice.

The Central Midlands Primary Care Commissioning Panel (PCCP) have approved the Local Dental network Chair, Jason Wong to host 5 events in each Sustainable Transformation Partnership (STP) footprint across the Region aimed at the local dental profession. Further information will be fed out in due course regarding the dates/ times of these events.

As part of a programme of work to improve their services, NHS Digital are removing the ‘NHS Choices’ logo from the NHS website. For further information please click this link NHS.UK website changes; you will also find advice outlining the changes that you and your organisations need to make to update both print and digital content to reflect these changes.

The original webpage for your practice remains on the site and it is important for your business that you keep your practice NHS website details up to date, from our understanding this responsibility will be mandated in the future contractually.

All NHS dental practices are listed on the NHS website. The 111 service and patients are increasingly using this as a resource to find primary care services as well as leave feedback about the service they have received. It is not helpful for 111, the patient or the practice if the information is out of date which may then result in unnecessary calls and expense. Many practice’s details are greyed out as they have not been maintained so please ensure your webpage on NHS website is kept up to date.

You are able to register for telephone interpretation services which will enable you to use an on demand telephonic interpreter. Before you can use this service you will need to register your practice so that a unique ID code can be issued to your practice to allow direct booking by yourselves. To register please complete the ‘Request to Register Form’ below and submit to:

Once you have an ID code you will be able to follow the attached user guide to access a telephone interpreter.

Should you have a patient who requires a face to face interpreter due to exceptional circumstances, please submit a business case to your local office including the information as above. The cost of this type of interpreter is very high in comparison to a telephone interpreter and you would need to be able to justify why such a service is necessary.

If you need to book a British Sign Language (BSL) interpreter please contact your NHS England local office, emails listed above with the following details and they will book an interpreter on your behalf; please allow at least ten days for the booking:

• Date and time of the appointment
• Preferred gender of the interpreter
• Length of appointment
• Reason for the appointment
• Full address and post code of the practice
• Patient’s initials
• Who and where the interpreter is to report to

NHS England will only pay for interpreter services booked via the above routes. We will not reimburse for bookings made independently by dental providers.

The procurement process to invest in NHS dental services within Milton Keynes has now started. A Prior Information Notice (PIN) has been published to provide early notification of intent to go to market. If you are interested in tendering for this opportunity, please register your organisation on the e-tendering portal, please use the following link: https://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/Notice/544710bc-e91b-43b4-a748-fed9ab69b22a

The 8-8 service will provide high quality healthcare using a multi-disciplinary approach and appropriate skill mix. This model of care for General Dental Services is designed to offer routine dental care as well as unscheduled care for patients not linked to a dental practice. The service will be expected to encourage patients into routine care either at their site or with other local dental practices. The site will be open from 8am – 8pm, 7 days a week, 365 days of the year including all Bank Holidays. The contract will be for 25,000 units of dental activity (UDAs).

A market engagement event will follow later in the year where prospective bidders will be able to attend to understand more regarding the proposed service and tendering process.