Oral Health Research Priorities: Results of a Priority Setting Partnership

Objectives: Despite considerable improvements, oral health remains a major public health problem and there are still many uncertainties about the effectiveness of prevention and treatment. We aimed to bring lay people and dental care professionals together in a priority setting partnership to identify the most important research questions related to interventions to improve oral health and/or reduce inequalities.

Methods: Working with the James Lind Alliance, we adopted a mixed methods approach. First, a national online survey used open questions to identify possible uncertainties relating to oral health. The data were screened and those out of scope were removed. The remaining uncertainties were mapped onto the existing literature by the Cochrane Oral Health Group to identify unanswered uncertainties, which were then prioritised in a second survey with closed questions, with the responses from lay people and professionals ranked separately to give equal weight to both groups. The final Top Ten priorities were selected by patients, carers and dental professionals in a nominal group technique workshop.

Results: In total, 607 people suggested over 1,100 possible uncertainties in the initial survey. Screening and literature mapping reduced this to a long list of 38 unanswered questions. Subsequently 1,402 lay people and professionals voted on the long list to create a shortlist of the 25 most important research questions. Twenty-eight lay people and dental care professionals agreed the Top Ten most important questions for research to address. The Top Ten priorities included topics related to dental public health, access to services, provision of services using new technologies, oral cancer diagnosis and communication.
Conclusions: We report the Top Ten UK research priorities for oral and dental health. The priorities have been disseminated to researchers and we have actively engaged funding bodies to encourage them to target funds at the research priorities of end users.