What will the impact of the project be?

Health and well-being

This project is expected to improve health and well-being of diabetic population with dental problem.

Economic Impact

This project is expected to improve economic productivity of this diabetic population by reducing the disease burden. It will help to reduce the direct and indirect cost related to diabetes and tobacco.

The cost of diabetes care substantially increased with the presence of comorbidities as well as complications related to diabetes. Oral diseases are also very common in this population, which has bidirectional association with diabetes that added up health care cost and cause poor quality of life. Overall, a person with diabetes spent 9% of his/her annual household income on management of diabetes, which is a notable financial burden for a family.

Currently, annual costs of diabetes care per person in the outpatient department of a tertiary care facility are around US$314. On the other hand, tobacco use exerts a huge economic burden in South Asian countries including Bangladesh and is linked to poverty particularly for those affected by NCDs like diabetes. Its use is exacerbating social inequalities and it’s cultivation is leading to environmental degradation and depletion of water resources. Therefore, the project will contribute to economic development and welfare of Bangladesh.

Research impact

The inter-disciplinary nature of the project will bring together Public Health researchers, clinical dentists and patients. This will provide opportunity for research collaboration between University of York (Department of Health Sciences) and BIRDEM. The development of the new research networks and collaboration will provide the opportunity for the future collaborative research. University of York also has research excellence on conducting research to tackle global health challenges. This project would be a great platform of starting collaborative research of these two organisations.

Capacity building

This will enhance researchers capacity in terms of knowledge exchange, translational research and developing new partnerships. The research collaborators of Bangladesh would also benefit from the opportunities in relevant research and advocacy skills. In future the BIRDEM Dental staff trained on tobacco cessation interventions will be able to transfer their learned-skills to the wider network for future scaling-up and act as master trainers.

The undergraduate dental students of Ibrahim Medical College, BIRDEM could be engaged with this TCDC study and in future tobacco cessation training could be advocated to incorporated in the under graduate dental curriculum.

Increase the degree of external stakeholder engagement

This will provide us opportunity for future wider stakeholder engagement (healthcare professionals, service providers, policy makers) to engage and showcase impact of the research beyond academia and to identify pathways to impact and future options for the sustainability of the study and economic development of Bangladesh.

Building ownership

This will build ownership of the intervention with dental health professionals of BIRDEM.

Direct beneficiaries from this work

Tobacco user diabetic patients with poor oral health: Our intervention could reduce the disease burden in the most impoverished people which will reduce the direct and indirect health care cost and improve their Quality of Life (QoL) and make them more productive and able to contribute to the economic development and welfare of the country.
Health service providers: our proposed co-developed intervention could be adapted into routine dental practice for other risk groups.

Future extension of project activity

After testing the intervention could be adapted to other dental settings with specific risk groups, like:

TCDC-for patients with oral lesions, oral premalignant disorders (OPMD), oral cancers.
TCDC-for patients with periodontitis.
TCDC-for patients with cardio vascular diseases.

The project could be adapted later for other LMICs.