Special Smiles Program

The goal of this program is to collect the standardized data regarding Special Olympics athletes’ oral health conditions. This type of standardized data collection will be adopted in all oral health examination stations of SOSS. In this way, valuable information about special situations will be acquired. After all collected information has been sent to SOSS, moreover, such an undertaking will be further promoted through public help – the teeth of the people with special needs will be treated and protected.

Standardization of Oral Health Examination
And why is standardization needed?

1. Although the method for oral screening of a population is similar to the clinical examination of single patient, there are still several apparent differences between the two. In clinical practices, oral examination and diagnosis include collecting physical symptoms and lab results of the patient, and making professional judgment to ascertain requirements for the patient’s treatment, based upon which develop a treatment plan. On the other hand, oral examiners collect people’s observed pathological symptoms, based upon which realize their treatment needs and design a treatment plan suitable for these people.

2. In order to judge oral health conditions and their temporal changes, it is usually necessary to check a number of (patients) samples, and such an examination is usually conducted together by a number of examiners. Due to their own potential differences among different examiners, the judgment standard used for measuring people’s oral conditions must stress on repeatable examination results (note: this is a statistical notion – repeated examinations on the same sample group of people should obtain the same result), rather than on findings from early diagnosis of one certain patient. Examiners use the above-mentioned judgment standard and methods in their examination processes, and record as required, which is termed as Standardization.

3. Standardization is very important for data collection. Based on definitive judgment standards, the behaviors of different examiners will be standardized, which reduces the bias caused by examiners due to different clinical education and experience. In this way, we can be certain that results of our oral examinations are effective (correctly divide the group of people into two classes: sick and healthy) and reliable. (adopting the uniform standards), After standardization, data collected from different examination stations can be incorporated.

4. All examiners are required to study this document and receive standardization training beforehand, so that they can all use the standard method for diagnosis, which will improve the confidence level of their results. The confidence level of one examiner (his/her ability to obtain the same result in the continuously ongoing examination process) cannot be determined by repeatedly examining (one same athlete), since each athlete has only several minutes for this kind of examination. (Besides, it should be considered that) by taking this type of examination and answering questions, an athlete has already made important contributions, even though it is under this situation (Special Olympics Games) and only once a year.

5. In order to achieve correct evaluation on athletes’ conditions, one important point is that in these examinations, you should discard your judgments formed by your professional training. In this type of oral examination, for example, you can only use the standardized definition to label if a tooth decays or not, although it has decayed from clinical point of view. Please keep in mind that the skills for examination in the standard methods do not equate to your skills for clinical examinations. Through this type of examination, however, you will help correctly evaluate these people. In the meantime, you can provide valuable data for oral conditions of athletes that need to be tracked.

6. Your interest in, time spent on and great effort to participating in the oral examination are appreciated.