Leadership role of dental associations: oral health promotion

'Promoting Oral Health: Guidelines for Dental Associations' is the product of Working Group 3 on Oral Health Promotion of the Commission on Oral Health, Research and Epidemiology of the FDI. This paper describes the guidelines document, its rationale and its potential utility. An organized planned sequence of activities, including policy formation and dissemination, planning group structure and function, information gathering, goal setting, strategic planning of objectives and interventions, implementation as well as monitoring and evaluation, are reviewed. Relevant to both industrialized and developing countries, these oral health promotion guidelines can be used to develop programmes to demonstrate the benefit of self-care and appropriate demand for dental services.