Helping to combat dental anxiety – first recipient of Cornwall challenge fund announced

Explaining the need for the initiative, Dr MacDougall said that two thirds of UK adults are scared of visiting the dentist, which can bring about further problems in clinical care, and he hoped FEMDA would help to provide a solution. 

“If someone is scared of visiting the dentist, they delay or avoid appointments, which makes any potential underlying problems worse,” he said. 

“And when problems are worse, treatments can be more invasive, which in turn can heighten anxiety. It’s a vicious circle. Most treatment for dental fear is focused on the use of general anaesthetic or sedation, but only behavioural and psychological interventions provide long term solutions. Through collaboration with Professor Tim Newton, Consultant of Psychology as Applied to Dentistry at Kings College Dental Institute, whose work focuses in this area, FEMDA was born.”

The Dental Anxiety Management System is a progressive web app that patients download, and it assesses their dental anxiety and specific dental cognitions before offering them a self-help report based on their anxiety level. 

This data is then fed back to a central dashboard for the practice that shows the overall level of dental anxiety and, where patients have given their permission, gives patient specific dental anxiety scores.

Professor Ray Jones, EPIC project director, said: 

“It’s fantastic that the FEMDA team has successfully applied for a grant from the Challenge Fund, and it’s great that such an innovative idea emerged from one of our initial project workshops and will be trialled, and hopefully eventually used, in Cornwall and beyond. That’s exactly what EPIC is trying to achieve – connecting people from the health and social care community with local technology companies and entrepreneurs to find innovative ways of using technologies to best improve health and social care outcomes as well as develop the eHealth business sector in Cornwall.”