The Age-Friendly Dental College Project is a systems-level initiative by CEDAC to help dental colleges become centres of excellence for geriatric oral health and community-linked healthy ageing. Dental health is an essential but often neglected part of healthy ageing — affecting nutrition, dignity, speech, social participation, and quality of life.
Vayosmitham is CEDAC’s community oral health programme that extends dental care beyond the clinic — bringing oral health awareness, screening, referral, and home-based dental care to older persons with mobility limitations, dementia, chronic disease, and palliative care needs.
The initiative is anchored at Indira Gandhi Institute of Dental Sciences, Nellikuzhi, Ernakulam, Kerala, as an Age-Friendly Dental College demonstration site. The professional and academic platform is strengthened through AGeD — the Association of Geriatric Dentistry — for training, standards, seminars, research, and wider dissemination. The model is aligned with the UN Decade of Healthy Ageing and WHO-GNAFCC principles.