This page is under review
Good dental health in childhood is critical to a child’s overall health and wellbeing, and to their school readiness. Children experiencing toothache may experience pain, infections, and sleepless nights and may find eating and socialising difficult. They risk missing school as a result of toothache or needing treatment.
Understanding levels of child dental disease is critical to targeting resources to help treat and prevent it. This is one of the key aims of NDIP. Note that NDIP is separate to Childsmile, meaning that your establishment may also be visited by Childsmile throughout the year.
Inclusion in NDIP is based on passive consent i.e. the child is included unless parents or carers communicate to the service otherwise. Therefore, it is imperative that the information that we send out is communicated to families at least 2 weeks prior to planned visits. This is a different consent process to Childsmile, the national oral health improvement programme operating in some schools, which is based on active consent.
The function of NDIP is written into the NHS Scotland Act 1978 and the Education Act 1980. This means there is a statutory duty to inspect children in schools.