BSP Gum Health Day Competition Winner - Hafsa Khan

‘Let’s Get Good Gum Health Trending’ - Winner of the BSP Gum Health Competition, Hafsa Khan

Hafsa Khan was a Fifth Year BDS student, studying at Bristol University Dental School, when she won the 2025 British Society of Periodontology’s (BSP) Best Student Entry in its Gum Health Day competition.

The judges remarked on the many excellent initiatives entrants created to raise awareness of the importance of gum health. Hafsa’s entry stood out. It was in the form of a video entitled ‘Clinic Confessions’ in which she involved different members of the team at Bristol Dental School, to convey important messages about gum health with a light-hearted tone.

In this interview she comments: “My supervisor, the periodontist Dr Ana Gambôa, encouraged me to enter as she felt that my happy and enthusiastic personality on clinic stood out. This, and the fact that I had also taken part in a number of educational initiatives, including oral health stalls for the university, gave me the confidence to give this competition a go. Periodontitis and maintaining good gum health is often poorly understood by patients. This is clear from the fact that periodontitis is one of the most common chronic inflammatory diseases seen in humans, which is concerning as it is entirely preventable. Everyone talks about ‘brushing your teeth’ with no reference to the gums - I strongly think we as professionals should come up with more upstream initiatives and educate parents and their children to ‘go and clean their teeth and gums’.

Hafsa Khan and Periodontist Dr Ana Gambôa

The concept of looking after the gums is definitely a hard one to instil, and this is why this competition was exciting. For decades, dental professionals have continued to raise awareness of gum disease and systemic health links, and they have been a true inspiration for us students to keep up the momentum and carry on the educational journey.

I therefore decided to enter the competition and put together a video involving different members of the clinic team, who are of various ages and from different backgrounds to make the gum health message more widely accepted. I didn’t want to focus solely on dentists who often have the typical ‘perfect’ smile and therefore whose view on gum disease might be a bit patronising from a patient’s viewpoint. I also felt that the video format resonated well with the current landscape of short form content, which seems to have cross generational appeal.

The colleagues I approached were mostly camera shy at first, but with some encouragement embraced the initiative wholeheartedly. Everyone wanted to support my entry and play a part in highlighting the need to improve gum health. The BSP competition brought us together with the same ambition to deliver an important message in a light hearted way. We all had fun, it was interactive and made us think outside the box.

Making this video was an eye opener. Patients need to be educated in new and innovative ways on how to cooperate to improve and maintain their long-term oral health. As we have seen to date, awareness of their gums is not at the top of people’s priorities.

In my final year of dental school, I had seen many patients with advanced gum disease who were more preoccupied about how their teeth looked and did not understand the significance or the severity of the disease or oral hygiene. Discussing the specific consequences, such as the link to systemic conditions which many patients are unaware of, is one way to bring the message home, but we absolutely need to find better ways to educate patients.

Winning the BSP competition was incredibly motivating. I saw how people reacted to the video and how they engaged with it, and I would love to create more video content in the future. I’ve thought about how they could be used in practice waiting rooms conveying simple and humorous messages that patients can easily absorb and understand. I feel that the messages would stick better this way too.

However, I realise that a blanket approach cannot work, and we need to engage different generations in ways that resonate best with them. Periodontal disease does not typically affect young children, but prevention is key.  We can also teach patients with active gum disease on how to stabilise and improve their gum health and educate older people on the consequence of tooth loss and how to stop it from happening again.

I was delighted to see that Philips supported this award - their preventive approach is in tune with my own. Philips kindly gave me their Sonicare electric toothbrush as part of my prize and I was interested to read the clinical research behind this product. Educating patients on efficient products is an important responsibility for us. It is also important to help patients in distinguishing between the less effective products from the effective ones, as well as helping to perfect brushing techniques as manual brushes can damage gums if used aggressively. A patient could go to a supermarket and grab any cheap and ineffective manual product which can not only have little positive impact on the teeth and gums but could in fact damage their gums which is counter intuitive. I am always keen to learn about new technology that can help patients improve their oral health at home.

Winning the award was followed by my graduation and I can’t wait to see what the future holds for me. I have lots of ideas to help patients outside the clinical setting. I would love to develop ambassador groups to relay key gum health messages to different communities and cultures in the UK. Some beliefs are deeply embedded and are hard to change, so having dental professionals representing various communities would help break down barriers and improve communication with hard to reach patients. Some issues are better addressed from within communities themselves, so for instance we should promote oral health more in mosques where people attend more often than their dentist and trust the message they are receiving just as equally. It is about coming up with the right content in the right way and having a sensitive approach.