Co‐Designing of Preventive Materials Between Dental Students and Primary School Teachers to Promote Oral Health: Impact on Professional Practices for French Dental Students

ABSTRACT Introduction This paper is aiming to present an experiment involving odontology students, teachers and pupils in elementary grades to investigate the potential benefits of co‐design activities to create preventive materials to promote oral health in schools. Materials and Methods A total of, 110 fourth‐year students, 47 volunteers teachers and 698 pupils in Grades 1 and 2 participated in the study. This work led to the creation and distribution to teachers of appropriate tools on the dental health. We wanted to assess how the odontology students felt during this co‐design project. Each of them was asked to complete the same questionnaire twice, at the beginning and at the end of the project. Results Our results show that they consider that the children and their parents' knowledge of oral health is largely inadequate. Moreover, a large majority of them (75%) felt that their participation would have a positive impact on the children's future behaviour and on their own future professional practice. Discussion The students' participation in this experiment in co‐designing with teachers shows that offering odontology students a different kind of learning, along the lines of what is being done in the United Kingdom with service‐learning, can be beneficial both for them and for the end‐users. Conclusion The participation of dental students in the specific educational training activity has a positive and significant impact of their mental representation and we can hope that the emergence of this paradigm of participatory design, also known as co‐creation, can lead to strong and lasting changes in health behaviours.