NYU College of Nursing
433 First Ave
New York, NY
United States
The Oral Health Nursing Education Program, which launched in 2011, has grown as a national and global leader in the field of nursing and interprofessional care. The curricula, reports, guidance and other products developed through OHNEP have been a catalyst for the fields of education, practice, and policy and advanced the integration of oral health into whole health.
Between Registered Nurses, Nurse Practitioners, and Midwives, the nursing workforce includes over 4 million providers and makes up an essential stakeholder group in relation to advancing broad oral health integration opportunities. In past years, as a result of OHNEPs work, oral health has become fundamentally integrated into the education and practice of nursing and midwifery as a core competency. In addition to academic and practice changes, OHNEP serves in core roles, representing oral health in nursing, with both Primary Care Collaborative and the National Interprofessional Initiative on Oral Health. Dr. Judith Haber, the Executive Director, was also a contributing author to the 2022 NIDCR report on Oral Health in America.
In 2021, OHNEP led a major 10-year update to the oral health competencies with relevant new information to modernize their curricula. Included in this is the development of Teaching Oral-Systemic Health (TOSH) Standardized Patience Clinical Experience and Case Study Discussion 9.0, which is a program that brings together medical, dental, nurse practitioner, midwifery and pharmacy students to participate in an interprofessional oral health educational experience.
Some of the notable peer-reviewed publications that have been produced recently include:
* “Attaining Interprofessional Competencies by Connecting Oral Health to Overall Health (Journal of Dental Education)
* “Senior oral health: A community-based interprofessional educational experience for nursing and dental students (Journal of Gerontological Nursing)
* “Promoting Oral Health for Mothers and Children: A Nurse Home Visitor Education Program (Pediatric Nursing)
As well, one recent success from the work OHNEP implemented in 2021 is that, through collaborating with Veteran’s Affairs (VA) on Non-Ventilator Hospital Associated Pneumonia (NHAP) efforts, nurse-led pneumonia protocol integrated oral health measures and has begun to be implemented in all 155 VA hospitals and long-term care facilitates in the country.
This proposal seeks to advance oral health integration with a focus on several specific populations and care delivery methods. The first area of work relates to partnership with several national organizations to build a model that integrates oral health into home visitor programs to better serve pregnant clients and their newborns and shows improved oral health education and behaviors over time. In addition to this, OHNEP will develop several products to better engage the field of nursing in the oral health needs of the disability community, including a Disabilities Oral Health Teaching and Learning Resource Kit. Lastly, to build on the success in preventative care for Veterans, OHNEP will collaborate with Press Ganey, the largest healthcare performance platform, to obtain approval for NHAP to be added to the National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators. This would result in health care organizations nationally including oral health as a NHAP quality indicator and would be a catalyst for the inclusion of NHAP language in standard terminology for electronic health records.
The budget for this proposal is $204,521, which primarily goes to the cost of personnel and travel associated with the deliverables in the scope of work. There is one additional budget line of $10,000 to cover the cost of sponsoring a special session at the American Association of Colleges of Nursing annual conference.
The total budget for OHNEP is 229,594, which means this funding represents 89% of the programs budget.