Smile4life: a co-designed educational and training resource guide

The second edition of the ‘Smile4life: a co-designed educational and training resource guide’ aims to enable practitioners and support workers from different backgrounds to provide evidence-based, tailored oral health promotion sessions through meaningful conversations with people experiencing homelessness. The content of this guide reflects the learning processes experienced within the Smile4life, the Scottish Oral Health Improvement Programme for people experiencing homelessness and addresses the needs of a wide variety of professionals working within the homelessness sector. The guide expect to raise awareness of the pivotal role that practitioners can play in terms of assessing service user readiness to change, and making every contact a health promotion opportunity for those facing homelessness to achieve and maintain good oral health. The methodology adopted to produce this Smile4life Guide used a co-design approach that involved interviews and workshops with seven different organisations from health and third sector, and people with lived experience of homelessness. This methodology was focused on the specific needs of people with lived experience of homelessness in order to develop an accessible training resource.