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Older people in residential aged care (RAC) experience some of the poorest oral health in Australia (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare 2007). Poor oral health can have a significant impact on quality of life due to pain, altered appearance, impaired speech, eating difficulties and malnutrition (Slade and Spencer 1994).
Increasingly, poor oral health Is being linked to many chronic diseases including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, renal disease, rheumatoid arthritis, aspiration pneumonia and cognitive decline (Galgut 2010).
A national training program for nursing staff endorsed by the Australian government was implemented to address poor oral health in residential aged care facilities (Lewis et al. 2015). Despite this implementation, oral health remains an issue in RAC (Webb et al. 2015), and nursing staff persist to bear the primary responsibility of providing oral healthcare to residents, hence, also taking the blame for their poor oral health (Lewis et al. 2015). Yet, oral health is a multifaceted issue that extends into the scope of many other health professions (Coleman 2005), therefore the role of other health professionals in this multidisciplinary model of care is paramount.
Several multidisciplinary models of care involving dental professionals have been successfully implemented...