The “Oral Care for Truckers” project has won the Moving Minds Award ’24. Every year, Hogeschool UCLL highlights its students’ most outstanding projects with the Moving Minds Award. Emerging as the best of the five nominees yesterday was “Oral Care for Truckers,” a project by two undergraduate Oral Care students with the goal of giving truckers a radiant smile.
At the start of the study, a trailer full of campaign materials hit the road. Stops were then made at IDEWE’s medical exam and various locations at Van Dievel. Meanwhile, students Sarah and Silke developed a refill stand that they placed at the truck stop where every driver regularly passes to get their papers in order. There, drivers could pick up free interdental brushes, a better alternative to dental floss.
Sarah and Silke spent many extra hours between trucks, chatting with truckers while filling up or at the carwash, taking their surveys and scoring with their self-designed boxes of brushes.
Results:
Brushing teeth twice a day increased by 15% using interdental brushes by 50%.
The ladies succeeded in getting oral hygiene included in the annual consultation at IDEWE. And, they even managed to attract the attention of FEBETRA, the professional federation of Belgian transport companies (and we are talking about 4,000 transport companies with a total of 80,000 drivers in Belgium).
During the award ceremony on 25/9 at UCLL campus Proximus in Heverlee, the students received a check for 2,500 euros, which they plan to use to further develop and secure this project in the transport sector and in our society.
