Despite the new year often signalling a clean slate, old challenges still exist for us as a charity. There’s still much work to be done, even on the most basic of things like providing education and support, changing attitudes and perceptions about oral healthcare, tackling childhood decay, and promoting practice in good oral hygiene.

There are also on-going issues of increasing the number of people visiting a dentist on a regular basis, seeing the addition of fluoride into drinking water in more areas of the UK, and raising more awareness about mouth cancer – cases of which continue to rise at an disturbing rate.

In this edition we try and address some of these issues. There’s lots of advice on a variety of oral health topics, from fluoride to phobia. Our Chief Executive Dr Nigel Carter OBE gives us his own top tips moving into the new year.

I hope you enjoy this issue of Word of Mouth!