Improving oral health for adults in care homes

A quick guide for care home managers

Published: October 2016

This guide explains how to achieve good oral health for people who live in care homes. It will be useful to care home managers and their staff. The guide includes an oral health assessment tool. 

Areas in this quick guide you will find interesting include:

• Poor oral health can affect people’s ability to eat, speak and socialise normally
• Oral health assessment
• Care staff knowledge and skills
• What the Care Quality Commission expects
• Further information

Quick guides, developed jointly by NICE and SCIE, are based on NICE guidelines and quality standards. They cover key points on social care topics that are relevant to specific audiences. This new format has been developed in response to feedback from the social care sector who report that they prefer information about improving services to be easily accessible, concise and visually appealing. The guides are available online and also as PDFs.

SCIE and NICE recorded a webinar discussing this topic further on 11 February 2020.