Kaiser donates $600K for school-based oral health programs

Kaiser Permanente has awarded a $600,000 grant to the National Assembly on School-Based Health Care (NASBHC) to increase access to oral healthcare for 3,000 children and adolescents.

NASBHC will use a competitive grant process to distribute a majority of the funding directly to the SBHC field to expand the scope of practice of existing staff. The geographic reach of the project will be across the U.S., with a focus on Colorado, California, Oregon, Washington, Georgia, Ohio, Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, DC.

Funding for the $600,000 grant is a result of Kaiser Permanente's employee wellness program, Healthy Workforce, through which the organization contributed $50 for each employee who took an online health risk assessment. Almost 23,000 Kaiser Permanente employees voluntarily participated in the program in its first year, which raised $1.2 million overall. The funding will be divided between NASBHC and Wholesome Wave.

More than 1,900 school-based health centers (SBHCs) across the U.S. provide access to almost 2 million students for a range of primary, mental, and oral healthcare services. Students in schools with SBHCs are predominantly members of minority and ethnic populations who have historically experienced underinsurance, lack of insurance, or other healthcare access disparities.

SBHC staff is currently trained to provide primary care and often mental health, but there is a need for increased capacity to provide oral healthcare, according to the NASBHC. A little more than half (57%) of SBHCs conduct oral health screenings onsite or by referral, and less than a quarter (20%) provide fluoride varnish onsite or by referral. Even fewer (10%) provide general dental care.

Because NASBHC and Kaiser Permanente believe that training and support of existing SBHC staff will help increase the number of patients who receive critical access to oral healthcare, the project will focus on training existing SBHC staff -- primary care providers and medical support staff -- to expand their scope of practice to include oral health risk assessment. The training will include assessment and intervention of dietary habits.

The project will also help SBHC staff build a referral network for their patients, and facilitate relationships between SBHC state associations and child oral health policy advocates, leading to increased knowledge, collaboration, and partnerships around service delivery and policy change, according to the NASBHC.

"With specialized training and support, our nation's SBHCs are well-positioned to provide their young patients with access to the oral healthcare they need to stay healthy and in school, and NASBHC's partnership with Kaiser Permanente will help make this happen," said Linda Juszczak, executive director of NASBHC, in a press release.