Out of sight, out of care: The marginalisation of oral health in public policy

Abstract

There is a strange quiet around oral health in South Africa: a kind of silence not born of irrelevance, but of omission. While the country mobilises around universal health coverage, builds policy frameworks for noncommunicable diseases 
and reimagines access to care, one part of the body continues to be left behind – the mouth.It is a disappearance that is subtle, systemic and dangerous. Oral health is scarcely mentioned in national policy debates, barely represented in funding streams and routinely overlooked in health planning and reporting. Despite the mounting evidence that oral diseases are widespread, interconnected with systemic illness and deeply inequitable in their distribution, the mouth remains invisible in the very spaces where health priorities are defined.