Get Involved!
Once you have made the commitment to make oral cancer screenings a daily part of your practice, please add yourself to our Partner Gallery by following these 3 easy steps:
- Download and print flyer.
- Take a well lit photo with you holding the sign.
- Email your image to [email protected]
April is Oral Cancer Awareness month and OCF would like to invite you to join us in our national screening campaign to end oral cancer! Oral Cancer awareness in the American public is low. Approximately 58,500 people in the U.S. will be newly diagnosed with oral cancer this year. 132 new people in the US EVERY DAY will be newly diagnosed with oral cancer, and that one person EVERY HOUR OF THE DAY, 24/7/365 will die from it
While smoking and tobacco use are still major risk factors, the fastest-growing segment of oral cancer patients is young, healthy, nonsmoking individuals due to the connection to the HPV virus. We cannot stop this virus from spreading; our only hope to save lives is with professional involvement and public awareness. This is your opportunity to get involved and give back to your community in hopes to raise oral cancer awareness and the need for early detection in order to save lives. Together, we have the opportunity to make a difference in the world of oral cancers.
How to Get nYou Practice Involved
Joining the movement is a simple process. The foundation promotes April through numerous press releases, and other outreach efforts to make the public aware that our partners are offering a simple visual and tactile screening for free during awareness month. The idea is to first have your practice listed on our April events calendar. This will only take a few minutes of your time and you can start the process by clicking here.
There are several ways to offer a free screening event to your community:
Scheduled Dental Office Screenings:
- Offer screenings throughout the month where interested patrons can call in and schedule an appointment. This way your staff can schedule the screenings at a convenient time for you; in-between currently scheduled patient appointments or even after hours. This will allow for more oral screenings to be completed while making the most of the staff’s time.
Office Event
- Block out a minimum 3-hour period to have an event in your office where walk-ins and appointments are welcome. To make this successful you will need to do some local promotion of your screening day in your community. From a self-made flyer put on a Starbucks bulletin board to line up interviews with the local paper and TV/radio media, this is not hard to do. They love to have a short filler piece about someone donating their time to improve community health. We know that you were trained in dentistry, not public relations. But this is no more involved than calling the station and offering to do the piece with them. Make this as large or little as you want.
Out of Office Public Event
- Choose a day to do your event; preferably weekends for the best turnout and walk-up traffic.
- Reach out to your local Walgreens, CVS, Walmart, or the like.
- Ask to do free screenings in their parking lot on the chosen date.
- Partner with the store for marketing, and any other items that they may provide – table, chairs, EZ-Up, or even a promotional banner. The foundation does tons of these a year, but you can do one as well. We can give you the ideas and the things you will need to put on a good screening event. You don’t even have to market the event if you are partnered with your local pharmacy to do it right by their front door where people are coming and going from all day. The traffic will already be there…..
Which of the three events you choose to do is truly the preference of your office and staff. With any of the three options above, the key to a successful screening event is marketing. OCF provides everything from downloadable patient release and referral forms to brochures on oral cancer for the public, and buttons, and wristbands for your staff. A packet of support materials will be sent to your office at no charge in March. A marketing guide on how to promote your office is also part of the downloadable packet, and following its guidelines will help you bring new patients to your office. And while we are talking about doing this in April which is Oral Cancer Month, this is a great practice builder any time of the year.
Opportunistic screening is our best hope of reducing the death rate from this disease. By participating in oral cancer awareness month, you are not only offering a positive service to your