Project description
Treating oral diseases before it’s too late
Oral healthcare is essential for overall health, quality of life and well-being. While the World Health Organization has urged for a comprehensive strategy to tackle oral diseases through prevention and care at an early stage, most Europeans still lack access to affordable treatments and oral health coverage packages. In this context, the EU-funded PRUDENT project will design and deploy a complete, cutting-edge and context-adaptive framework for optimised financing of oral health services. As such, PRUDENT will use different methods and collaborate with various institutions (public, civil, professional and others) to investigate and define priorities, incentives and financial resources necessary to make European dentistry policy sustainable.
Objective
Oral diseases and conditions are the 3rd most expensive diseases to treat in the EU. They affect about half of the EU population. As highlighted in the 2021 WHO Oral Health Resolution, there are major challenges in the financing of oral health care: in deviation from the UN and WHO goal of Universal Health Coverage, many EU citizens do not have access to essential oral health care without financial hardship. This causes detrimental impacts for the individual citizen, while increasing costs and wasting resources on the macro level. Research-policy gaps and research-practice gaps keep triggering inertia and inaction instead of addressing the persistent, albeit largely preventable, burden of oral diseases. To this end, the PRUDENT (Prioritization, incentives and Resource use for sUstainable DENTistry) project aims to develop and implement an innovative and context-adaptive framework for optimized financing of oral care. PRUDENT brings together top investigators from prestigious universities, public authorities and policymakers, civil society and patient organizations, health insurers, and health professionals, to achieve a step change in collective problem solving. Given the comprehensiveness of the topic, PRUDENT uses a targeted approach that is entirely focused on four major root-causes underlying the current limitations of oral care financing. Using a mixed-methods research approach, PRUDENT will: (i) co-develop oral health system performance indicators and implement them in EU-wide monitoring framework; (ii) conduct real-world and lab experiments to identify improved oral care financing mechanisms; (iii) leverage regulatory learning, needs-adaptive resource planning and deliberative priority setting to enhance the improvement of oral care financing. The knowledge gained will be merged into the PRUDENT Financing Companion with policy briefs and decision aid tools for concretely actionable and context-adaptive improvement of oral care financing.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.2.1 - Health Main Programme
- HORIZON.2.1.6 - Health Care Systems
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-RIA - HORIZON Research and Innovation ActionsCoordinator
6525 GA Nijmegen
Netherlands