I am looking forward to being AHCJ’s new oral health core topic leader and pointing you to resources and having a conversation about a sometimes overlooked, often fascinating facet of health care coverage.
I hope you will look to the site – which will launch in the coming weeks – for useful data, news about upcoming events and shared wisdom as well as a growing glossary of terms, and information about key oral health concepts. And please check my weekly blog posts, which will highlight the work writers and researchers are doing to explore oral health within their communities and beyond.
When you start to look, the stories are surprising in their variety.
While some look at the need for more care in rural places or nursing homes, others touch upon oral health disparities across racial or ethnic lines. There are accounts of local battles over water fluoridation programs, coverage of new dental care provider models, reports on research into connections between oral and systemic health and investigations into cases of Medicaid fraud.
I see this site as a place to explore all these aspects of covering oral health and many more.
AHCJ is a community, a place for health care journalists, sometimes working in isolation from one another, to gather and share insights. This site should offer one more useful source of ideas and inspiration. I hope you will feel free to weigh in with your own experiences, quandaries, needs and examples. Please send them to mary@healthjournalism.org or leave a comment on the blog.
Mary Otto, AHCJ’s topic leader on oral health, is writing blog posts, editing tip sheets and articles and gathering resources to help our members cover oral health care.
If you have questions or suggestions for future resources on the topic, please send them to mary@healthjournalism.org.
I got interested in covering oral health in 2007, writing about the death of a child who had suffered complications from an untreated dental infection. At the time, I was working at The Washington Post. I left that job in 2008 in a newsroom downsizing, but I have continued to write about oral health ever since, as a freelance writer for the Post, drbicuspid.com, and other publications.
I think I might manage to learn something new about the subject every day. I hope the oral health topic pages might help serve that same purpose for you.
