Best Practice Approaches

The ASTDD Best Practices Project promotes best practices for state, territorial and community oral health programs. Best Practice Approaches information provided on this Website is meant to help programs develop their best practices within the context of their environment. Through proven and promising best practices, effective programs will be better able to help achieve the Healthy People 2020 Oral Health Objectives and to meet the National Call to Action to Promote Oral Health.

For the purposes of the ASTDD Best Practices Project, a Best Practice Approach is defined as a public health strategy that is supported by evidence for its impact and effectiveness. Evidence includes research, expert opinion, field lessons, and theoretical rationale. For each Best Practice Approach analyzed and reported on this website, varying strength of evidence is observed.

The term "Best Practice Approach" is intended to emphasize there is more than one "best" implementation strategy that may produce successful outcomes.  The context of individual state and community programs, and the environment in which they are developed and implemented, may impact whether an implementation strategy is successful.  Variables to consider are:   leadership, political acceptability, available resources, feasibility, and implementation constraints that are specific to a program's environment.  These variables will influence the acceptability and adaptability of best practice approaches.

The Best Practice Approach Reports listed on this website are provided to guide program planning, development, implementation and evaluation.  They are meant to serve as a resource to share ideas and cultivate best practices to achieve impact or effectiveness, efficiency, sustainability, and collaboration or integration.

States, communities and territories have submitted State Activity Submissions as examples of success stories and lessons learned to serve as models of implementation strategies for best practices or promising practices.  ASTDD encourages programs to add to this collection of examples by sharing their program's success stories and lessons learned.