Safeguard Your Smile an oral health literacy intervention.

No intervention, only a conventional pamphlet will be given.

Safeguard Your Smile intervention will consist of following five components:

i) Reviewing photonovel (educational booklet) with participants to help them understand adequate oral hygiene self-care behavior. ii) Demonstrating adequate tooth brushing, flossing and tongue cleaning (frequency, duration and technique) on dentoform iii) Helping participants to make a concrete plan (specifying when where and how will they perform oral hygiene self-care behavior and a coping plan). Also, to identify a prompt/cue that would act as a reminder. iv) Assigning a task to participants to daily check-mark their behavioral progress on a calendar provided in the photonovel for the next three months. v) Follow up by making three phone calls to each participant of the intervention group once a month.

Using a self administered questionnaire

Using a self administered questionnaire

Loe and Sillness gingival index scores to assess gingivitis, score 0=no gingival inflammation, 1=mild inflammation-slight change in colour of gingiva, 2=moderate inflammation-moderate glazing, redness, edema and hypertrophy, tendency to bleed, score 3=severe inflammation, marked redness and hypertrophy, tendency to spontaneous bleeding.

Loe and Sillness plaque index on the six Ramfjord teeth (16, 12, 24, 36, 32, 44 on proximal, buccal and lingual sides). Score 0= no dental plaque seen in the gingival area; score 1= dental plaque present on the free gingival margin; score 2= moderate accumulation of dental plaque at the gingival margin seen by naked eye and score 3= abundant dental plaque in the gingival margin.

Participant's oral health literacy levels will be measured using validated oral health literacy measurement instrument i.e. TS-REALD (Two Stage Rapid Estimate of Adult Literacy in Dentistry). TS-REALD is a word recognition routing test in which participants are asked to read a list of 5 dental words aloud and one point is given for the correct answer. This first stage of the test categorizes the participants depending on their scores into three groups of stage 2 for further testing: i) low literacy stage-2 (4 words test); ii) average literacy stage-2 (6 words test); and high literacy stage-2 ( 3 words test).The score from routing test is added to stage-2 score and this is called raw score. This raw score is translated into a scaled score by using the scaled score translational table that had been derived using psychometric testing. Specific cut offs for high and low oral health literacy are determined using the mean and the standard deviation of the scaled scores.