Healthy Smile Happy Child Initiative

Healthy Smile Happy Child (HSHC) is an intersectoral, collaborative partnership that takes an upstream community development approach to engage communities in Early Childhood Caries (ECC) prevention strategies and promotion of early childhood oral health

HSHC has a logic model that is guided by three fundamental principles, namely, community engagement and development, knowledge exchange related to oral health promotion, and research, evaluation and quality improvement. Key objectives of the HSHC project have been to:

1) gain community acceptance of the importance of the issue of ECC

2) build on existing programs which target young children

3) increase parental knowledge of ECC prevention

4) increase knowledge of existing service and health providers of the importance of prevention

5) encourage existing service and health providers to incorporate prevention activities into their practice.