Getting oral care to people who can’t easily reach it
Now in pilot with a residential aged care provider in NSW.
A carer takes a few guided photos on a phone. A registered dental clinician reviews them and returns a clear screening report, so you know who needs to see a dentist, and how soon. No appointment, no transport, no waiting for a problem to announce itself.
Smile Advisor is a screening and triage service. It helps decide who needs to see a dentist and how soon. It is not a diagnosis, and not a substitute for an in-person dental examination.
Illustrative sample report. Not an actual resident record.
01: Why it matters
In aged care, oral health rarely gets a section of its own. It sits under the personal-hygiene banner, gets a tick on a busy shift, and stays out of sight until something hurts. Yet the mouth is connected to almost everything else your clinical team watches.
In 2022–23, almost 16,000 Australians aged 65 and over were hospitalised for dental conditions that were potentially preventable (AIHW data). The Australian Dental Association projects that number could grow by another 42% by 2027–28 if nothing changes.
Poor oral hygiene is a recognised risk factor for aspiration pneumonia, one of the most serious infections in aged care. Trials suggest daily oral care may help reduce pneumonia deaths in nursing homes, though researchers are clear more evidence is needed (Cochrane, 2022).
Tooth loss and ill-fitting dentures are linked to poorer nutrition and frailty in older people, for a simple reason: when chewing hurts or doesn’t work, a varied diet is the first thing to go.
Gum disease and type 2 diabetes each make the other harder to control, and clinical trials show treating gum disease brings a modest, measurable improvement in blood-sugar control (Cochrane, 2022).
Almost all of it is preventable with the basics done consistently: a mouth that gets looked at, daily care that actually happens, and a dentist involved before the pain starts.
02: The challenge
Mouths don’t get looked at often, and when they do, the record is rarely in one place. Five gaps show up again and again.
Residents often can’t tell you their mouth hurts. Between infrequent dental visits, decay, gum disease and ill-fitting dentures progress unseen, until pain, weight loss, refusing food or an infection forces an urgent, avoidable visit.
Many residents arrive with no dental history at all, especially on transfer from hospital or another facility. Admission paperwork asks about hearing and eyesight; the mouth is often missed. Some teams don’t have a reliable record of who wears dentures.
The strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards expect providers to facilitate oral-health assessment when a resident starts care and at regular intervals, to monitor and respond to deterioration, and to support access to a dentist. Showing you did all three is time your clinical team doesn’t have.
Mobile dental visits are hard to schedule, expensive and infrequent. Most residents wait for a problem to become urgent before anyone with dental training looks in their mouth.
On a busy shift, the tick in the chart is quick and the clean itself takes time, and without a system the two drift apart. Add paper consent forms, PDF reports in inboxes, and no single view of who’s been screened, and it becomes hard to know which residents have quietly missed out. When an assessor asks, the honest answer is often “we can’t tell”.
We’ve been on the other side of this problem.
We run a mobile dental service in NSW. For years we’ve carried our kit into aged care facilities and worked through that day’s list. And the list was always the same kind of list: pain that had been building for months, infections, dentures that stopped fitting a long time ago.
So we tried to fix it from our side. We put together a preventative care program: regular visits, staff education, earlier checks. It helped the residents we saw. But between visits, the day-to-day stayed exactly as it was. Mouths went unchecked, daily care came down to memory, and by our next visit the list had refilled itself.
The gap was in the everyday: who looks in a mouth between dental visits, who records the care that happens at the bedside, who notices deterioration while it’s still early. Smile Advisor was built to close that gap.
That’s why we bring the dentist’s eye to the bedside.
A carer takes a few guided photos on a phone; a registered dental clinician reviews every screening and returns a clear, plain-language report. No appointment. No transport. No waiting for a problem to announce itself. Your clinical team gets an oral-health picture across the whole facility: who’s been screened, who’s due, who needs a dentist. Every screening, referral and review is captured as a dated, auditable record you can put in front of an assessor.
Here’s how it works.
03: How it works
No clinical training is needed to capture a screening. The app does the coaching; a clinician does the judgement.
A carer or nurse follows on-screen prompts to take a set of guided photos of the resident’s mouth on a standard smartphone. The app checks the framing of each shot, so you don’t need to be a photographer, or a clinician, to get usable images.
A registered dental clinician reviews the photos and the resident’s answers and marks up what they see. Every report is checked and approved by a person before it is issued. Nothing is sent to a resident or family unreviewed.
You receive a plain-language screening report: what was noted, how urgent it looks, and whether a dentist visit is recommended, so your team and the resident’s family know what to do next.
04: Between visits
Between the screening and the dental visit, oral care happens every day: brushing, dentures, keeping an eye on what the report flagged. Smile Advisor gives the care team a hand with the daily part, and leaves a record that it happened. Daily dental care becomes something a care leader can actually see.
Care staff log the day’s oral care (brushing, denture care) in the nurse app in seconds. Entries are append-only, with corrections made in the open, so the record reflects what actually happened at the bedside. Recorded, not remembered.
Care leaders get a Hygiene view in the facility console: daily oral care across residents, at a glance. It’s a record that care happened, and a clear view for the people who need one, not a scoreboard.
A browsable library of short, curated video guides sits alongside the nurse app: brushing technique, denture cleaning, and choosing and using everyday oral-care products. Quick refreshers to watch at the bedside or on a break, not a training course.
Illustrative sample entries. Not an actual resident record.
Because it’s recorded, daily oral care joins the same evidence pack as your screenings and referrals: a dated record that routine care was carried out, not just remembered.
05: Who it’s for
Screen every resident on a regular cadence without booking a mobile dentist for each one. Smile Advisor gives your clinical team an oral-health picture across the whole facility: who has been screened, who is due, and who needs follow-up. It also produces the evidence your team needs at audit time.
See what it evidences06: Compliance & assurance
Under the strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards in force since 1 November 2025, providers are expected to facilitate oral-health assessment when a resident starts care and at regular intervals, to monitor and respond to deterioration, and to support access to a dentist. Those obligations are yours, and they stay yours. What Smile Advisor does is make them easy to evidence: every screening, referral, review, and daily oral-care entry is captured as a dated, auditable record you can put in front of an assessor.
A per-facility report your governing body can hand to an assessor: how many residents have been screened, who is due or overdue, referrals made, and deterioration flags raised, organised around your Standard 5 clinical-care obligations.
A baseline screening when a resident is onboarded to Smile Advisor, then a recurring recall cadence for everyone, so “when care starts and at regular intervals” is something you can show, not just assert.
When a resident’s oral health looks worse than a previous screening, Smile Advisor raises a flag and prompts reassessment, helping you evidence the duty to monitor and respond to deterioration.
When a dentist visit is recommended, it is captured as a tracked referral, with urgency, so you can evidence that access to a dentist was facilitated. Smile Advisor supports the referral; it does not replace the dentist.
Structured, versioned capture of who a resident’s decision-maker is and what they have consented to, replacing paper consent forms with an auditable record.
If a clinician sees something that may warrant escalation, Smile Advisor assembles a time-stamped evidence bundle for your incident process. Your facility decides whether it is reportable and makes any report. Smile Advisor never reports on your behalf.
A structured oral-health summary shaped to drop into a resident’s care and services plan.
Day-to-day oral care (brushing, denture care) logged by care staff as an append-only record, so the routine care between screenings is documented, not just remembered.
Every report view is logged, and records are retained for seven years, in line with Aged Care Act record-keeping duties and NSW health-records law.
Smile Advisor helps facilities evidence obligations under the Aged Care Act 2024 and the Aged Care Quality Standards. It is a screening and triage tool. It is not a provider of aged care, not a dental service, and not a substitute for professional dental treatment or your facility’s clinical judgement.
We’re bringing Smile Advisor to a small number of aged care facilities in NSW. Leave your details and we’ll come back to you with clear, honest information, so you can decide whether it fits your facility. If you’d rather just watch how other facilities go first, that’s fine too; tell us and we’ll keep you posted.
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