Discussing the limitations of dental health education,
Croucher3 suggested that the dominant approach has been
expert led, and individually orientated, featuring persuasive,
behaviour changing communication, based around the KAB
(knowledge, attitudes and behaviour) concept. There have
been many criticisms of this:
• Its prescriptive and expert-led nature is victim-blaming
• It can cause ill health by making people feel guilty
• It is elitist, as being expert-led it assumes that the
individual has a limited amount of knowledge
• It operates separately from the people it serves, with
little if any attempt to find out what they need.
Following the critiques of Towner and Croucher, two
reports examined the research evidence, and some of their
conclusions are shown below: