A note from our President

We are only at the end of February yet a look at the BSP website News page shows a lot of items – we are already on page 2 for 2021! Please keep an eye on this and follow the Society on social media to keep up to date.

It has been an extremely busy start to the year for the Team at BSP. Our UK version of the S3 Treatment Guidelines for Periodontitis paper was published online in the Journal of Dentistry, with open access: https://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S0300-5712(20)30310-9

Producing these guidelines in such a short space of time has been an incredible achievement. On behalf of the Society, I would like to thank all of the dental professionals, medical experts, stakeholders and BSP Patient Forum members, who worked hard, together, to make this project a huge success.

To assist members and the wider dental community in interpreting the guidelines, the BSP has carefully planned and created educational resources to support the profession. These resources will be added to the dedicated website page under the Professionals tab:  www.bsperio.org.uk/S3-Guidelines

Our series of four educational webinars have attracted over 8,000 bookings. We still have two webinars yet to be presented, so make sure you register to view them via the website Events page.

In addition, the BSP has been kindly supported by GSK on this project. We have worked together to record several educational videos and produce flowchart resources to help dental care professionals to implement the guidelines in clinical practice. The flowchart QR code will link to a short, informative video, guiding you through the four steps. We shall be working with GSK to distribute the flowcharts to UK dental practices over the coming weeks.

We have also created a series of short video clips, to be shared via social media and our website, to help to spread the important educational message to the wider dental profession, patients and the public. (These resources will be added to the website very soon.)

Finally, the BSP has created a lay version of the guidelines and flowchart for the public and patients, which conveys the importance of gum health in a simplified, informative way. The lay version will allow patients to empower themselves with evidence-based information to both take responsibility for aspects of their disease management and know that they are being offered appropriate, contemporary, evidence-based treatment.

The days are finally getting tangibly longer and hopefully we can now start to see a way out of our current situation, although of course there are still many challenges for lots of us and our families and friends. We need to try to stay positive, be kind to others and to ourselves.

We hope that you feel the Society is supporting you. If you have any feedback or queries, please do get in touch.