Traveller, Roma and Gypsy communities

Dentaid The Dental Charity works with partners to deliver accessible dental care for Traveller, Roma and Gypsy people. This work takes us to communities where we offer outreach dental services for people of all ages including children. In addition to dental care and screening, we provide oral health education messages through our BrightBites programme. By engaging with support services offered by local councils and charity partners we can break down some of the barriers these communities traditionally face in accessing dental care.

Research published by one of our partners Friends Families and Travellers states that “Romany Gypsy, Roma and Irish Traveller communities are known to face some of the starkest inequalities in healthcare access and outcomes amongst the UK population, including when compared with other minority ethnic groups.” The published research cited the reasons for this to include: “Lack of trust in services as a result of fear, digital exclusion and lack of accessible information and inequalities in access to healthcare waiting lists for nomadic populations.” ¹

Dentaid’s approach is to help our patients to overcome any practical, emotional and physical barriers they encounter in accessing treatment. By taking patients’ medical histories in a conversational way and delivering a service for a specific Traveller, Roma or Gypsy community that links to other activities on offer, we have helped some children to see a dentist for the first time.

“Some of our clients do struggle with literacy and therefore find filling out the relevant forms a challenge which means they are not able to access dental care. There are a lack of NHS services and private services are very costly which means families are often not able to access this. The Dentaid service helps us hugely because it has directed our work more to have a focus on oral health. For example, as a result of Dentaid visits we have run fun youth sessions around oral health to raise awareness of the importance of this.” Tommy, support worker at Friends Families and Travellers Brighton.