Do schools put children’s oral health at risk owing to lack of a health-promoting policy?

Background: To achieve a healthy school environment with good nutrition as recommended by World Health Organization, health-promoting policies are needed. Aims: To ascertain whether Finnish schools had oral-health-promoting policies and whether the presence of the policy was associated with practical actions related to oral-health promotion. Another aim was to determine if and how the policy and the actions had changed in 2007–09. Methods: This longitudinal survey was implemented in Finnish upper comprehensive school classes 7–9 (n=970) in 2007–09. The questionnaire contained 32 questions concerning selling of sweet- and healthy products, school policy, and decision-makers of the policy. From the nine items on the questionnaire, three variables were formed by weighting the response categories: Policy, Exposure, and Enabling. The mean values of each variable were calculated and the statistical significances of the changes were analysed using nonparametric Friedman’s test. The correlations between the varia...