Training teachers to implement a school oral health education programme in Tanzania

Tanzania has a national programme for oral health educationwhich is implemented by teachers at primary school level. Mostteachers are not trained for this task and they have low abilitiesand willingness for it. In this study, the oral health educationsessions conducted by teachers at school were observed to bedeficient in content and in methods, addressing only toothbrushingin theory. Thus, a training model for the teachers was designed,implemented and evaluated, that was based on the teachers' trainingneeds and other local conditions. A simple oral health educationmanual was designed to answer the educational needs of the pupils,and using it as a framework, all 125 teachers involved in schooloral health education in one district were trained in workshops.These were conducted by dental personnel in cooperation withschool administrators. For comparison, a sample of primary schoolteachers in an adjacent district were provided with the oralhealth education manual for self-learning without workshop training.Evaluation done 2 months afterwards revealed that the teacherstrained in workshops, but not those who had studied the manualalone, had improved remarkably the quality of their oral healtheducation sessions. The new sessions taught both the conceptsand the skills of oral health care in a manner that activelyinvolved the pupils in the learning process. This action studydone in a Third World setting reveals the need for evaluationand support of the implementation of school oral health education,and demonstrates a feasible and effective means for doing it.