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PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Public Health Education and Promotion
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1548544
This article is part of the Research Topic Integrating Oral Health into Public Health: Bridging Gaps to Reduce Health Disparities in the US View all 6 articles
Community-Engaged Research as a Pathway to Oral Health Equity: Insights from a Texas Initiative
Provisionally accepted- Texas Health Institute, Austin, United States
Solutions to advance oral health equity require a deeper understanding only achieved though partnership with the communities deeply impacted by barriers to care. While numerous studies and dental public health reports published over the years demonstrate a need for oral health equity, there is a paucity of literature regarding community engagement as a pathway to advancing oral health equity. As a human-centered design approach, Community-Engaged Research (CER) provides opportunities to engage communities as research partners, while developing trust and capacity for sustainable collaboration and participatory systems thinking. Building on literature and our experiences from leading a community-engaged oral health equity project in Texas, this perspective article offers actionable concepts of trust, time, and co-design to encourage the use of community-engaged practices that assess and address complex factors that impact oral health.
Keywords: Community, Oral health equity, Human-centered design, Community-engaged research, System transformation
Received: 19 Dec 2024; Accepted: 28 Feb 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Price, Williams, Mayo Jacks and Sanghavi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Blair Williams, Texas Health Institute, Austin, United States
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