Health professionals and mouth cancer - Dentists

Visit your dentist regularlyThe role of dentists

The importance of opportunistic mouth cancer screening is now being stressed by most British dental organisations including the British Dental Association, the Faculty of General Dental Practitioners and the British Dental Health Foundation.

Ensuring you have procedures in place to spot the early symptoms of mouth cancer is beneficial for your patients and helps protect your surgery from legal action.

What can you do?

It is essential that the whole dental team is aware of the importance of mouth cancer and the procedures your surgery has in place. In particular:

  • Make sure all your staff are aware of the early warning signs of mouth cancer and know how to check for them during routine dental examinations
  • Download our referral guidelines which include full colour photographs and detailed referral information
  • Make sure you have a specialist referral process in place and all the team are aware of this procedure
  • Be ready to identify at risk groups for particular attention
  • Talk to your patients about mouth cancer risks and early warning signs

The BDA publishes an informative guide to management strategies for dental practices entitled Opportunistic Oral Cancer Screening.

Using tolonium chloride/Toluidine Blue

Some dentists choose to use tolonium chloride (also known as Toluidine Blue) to screen certain patients in addition to visual and digital examination. You might use this test on patients who you think are particularly at risk of mouth cancer or to confirm a suspicious lesion you identified visually.

The test involves a patient rinsing and gargling with tolonium chloride, which should stain any suspicious tissue blue. It takes around five minutes. Although the test is generally accurate, patients with positive results should be tested again 10-14 days later. This gives benign lesions an opportunity to heal. For more on this test see the BDA website.

Dentists and health promotion

The government is placing increasing emphasis on oral health promotion, as seen in the dental contract that came into affect in April 2006.

Talking about mouth cancer can be a useful way to bring up healthy living topics such as stopping smoking or chewing tobacco, reducing alcohol consumption and healthy eating.

For leaflets on healthy living to use during consultations or display in your waiting room please visit our publications pages.