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On June 17-18, 2002 over 150 leaders and experts from health professions education, regulation, policy, advocacy, quality, and industry attended the Health Professions Education Summit to discuss and help the committee develop strategies for restructuring clinical education to be consistent with the principles of the 21st-century health system.

This report from the committee on the Quality of Health Care in America makes an urgent call for fundamental change to close the quality gap, recommends a redesign of the American health care system, and provides overarching principles for specific direction for policymakers, health care leaders, clinicians, regulators, purchasers, and others.

The Josiah Macy Foundation’s 2007 conference on continuing education (CE) in the health professions identified the need, and set the stage for, improvement in this last and longest phase of health professionals’ education. Establishing a platform for change in an era of health care reform, the report stressed incorporatingfindings from the extensive literature of health professions’ CE.

A workforce of knowledgeable health professionals is critical to the discovery and application of health care practices to prevent disease and promote wellbeing. Yet today’s professional health workforce is not consistently prepared to provide high quality health care and assure patient safety. One contributing factor to this problem is the absence of a comprehensive and well-integrated system of continuing education in the health professions.

This national consensus statement was developed to help health professionals, program administartors and staff, policymakers, advocates, and other stakeholders respond to the need for improvements in the provision of oral health services to women during pregnancy. Ultimately, the implementation of the guidance within this consensus statement should bring about changes in the health-care-delivery system and improve the overall standard for care. 

This IOHPCP report describes the structured approach, processes and outcomes addressed at the three components of the IOHPCP initiative. Concomitantly, HRSA synthesized the following recommentations:

1. Apply oral health core clinical competencies within primary care practices to increase oral health care access for safety net populations in the united States.

Oral health and oral health literacy are the focus of interest at the national level as demonstrated in the recommendations from two recent IOM reports and in the objectives of Healthy People 2020 (HHS, 2010a; IOM, 2011a,b). Although the field of oral health literacy is less well developed than health literacy, the roundtable was interested in exploring findings from research in this area and how such findings are being translated into oral health practice. In addition, the Roundtable was interested in the intersection between oral health literacy and health literacy.

Oral health care is not uniformly attainable accross the nation. Unfortiunately, individuals who face the greates barriers to care are often among the most vulnerable members of our society. The impact of unmet oral health care needs is magnified by the well-establised connection between oral health and overall health. 

This report presents a vision for oral health care in the United States, where everyone has access to quality oral health care throughout the life cycle. 

Oral health care is often excluded from our thinking about health. taken together with vision care and mental health care, it seems that problems above the neck are commonly regarded as peripheral to health care policy. This division is reinforced by the fact that dentists, dental hygienists, and dental assistants are separated from other health care professionals in virtually every way: where they are educated and trained, how their servises are reimbursed, and where they provide oral health care.

The intent of this first-ever Surgeon General’s Report on Oral Health is to alert Americans to the full meaning of oral health and its importance to general health and well-being. Great progress has been made in reducing the extent and severity of common oral diseases. Successful prevention measures adopted by communities, individuals, and oral health professionals have resulted in marked improvements in the nation’s oral and dental health.