Welcome to Bridge2Aid

Oral diseases affect around 3.5 billion people around the world, hitting the poorest and most disadvantaged populations hardest. For almost two decades Bridge2Aid has focused on helping these communities.

We are a small UK based training charity. Our work is carried out in partnership with community health workers, dentists, dental therapists, dental associations, and governments in Africa.  We train people in oral health promotion, delivering community-based oral health education programmes and training other health workers to give emergency dental treatment.  The work is focused in deprived areas – especially remote and rural ones.

We focus on these communities because this is where the problems are worst.  There is an extremely low level of oral health literacy, so communities are unaware of even basic health behaviours, or information such as the link between dietary sugars and dental disease.  There is also little access (if any) to any kind of dental treatment.  These left behind communities need to be given the tools and knowledge to become stronger and more resilient, which is where we come in.   Our approach is to listen to communities in need and ask, ‘How can we help?’.  Through developing training specific to the needs of the community we can ensure that the training we deliver is appropriate and effective.

Our training focusses on the existing healthcare workers serving these remote areas.  We support local partners to develop and deliver cascade training models for sharing oral health promotion messages.  We work with local partners to deliver education in oral health promotion directly in their communities.  And where there is government commitment to work with us to develop ongoing train-the-trainer programmes we train local dentists to train rural healthcare workers in OUT (Oral Urgent Treatment).

Most of our training is delivered by African dentist and health workers.  We are empowering our colleagues and partners by putting them at the centre of our training – and we’re working with them to train more trainers. Working this way means that we can expand our training in prevention and pain relief while meeting the increasing need.

Our aim is to advance global health education.  We are open to developing training anywhere in the world where our help is requested.  Our focus will always be delivering the best training possible and changing the health of communities in need.