The annual QMUL Festival of Communities took place over the weekend in Stepney Green Park on Saturday 11th June and the Queen Mary Mile End Campus on Sunday 12th June 2022.
Institute of Dentistry @ The Festival of Communities 2022
The Festival brings together a range of hands-on, family friendly activities which are designed to help local people learn something new or try something different and to provide an opportunity to meet and interact with people they haven't met before. Activities are run by Queen Mary staff and students-- showcasing the research and services of the University, and local groups within Tower Hamlets-- showcasing organisations, services, and activities happening in the borough.
Over 8000 people visited the festival over the two days, and the The Institute of Dentistry was represented by 2 stalls – A Virtual Reality Dental Clinic and Oral health for General Health: Living with Diabetes.
Oral health for General Health: Living with Diabetes- Aylin Baysan and Saroash Shahid
Aylin’s previous public engagement activities on 'Awareness of Oral Health for patients with Diabetes' have had significant interests by the Diabetes community such as podcasts involving patients with Diabetes, educational talks to lay patients groups with information leaflets. Aylin continuously give educational talks to Diabetes patient groups to raise awareness of oral health for general health (to-date >500 attendees). Following her talks, attendees adjusted their oral health routines.
In this festival, the activity aimed involving patients in addition to the previous initiatives to raise the awareness of oral health in Diabetes as a way of sharing their voice and to spread our mission on oral health to wider community.
The activities at the QMUL Festival of Communities involved:
Virtual Reality Dental Clinic – Ben Audsley, Samira Azim and Nishat Hossain
Members of the public and the local community were able to experience a real life dental clinic, and a Dental Prosthodontics lab/escape room in Virtual Reality!
In two different VR scenarios, the community was immersed within Virtual Reality and experienced a real life dental clinic, so that they could watch how we train our dental students.
The adult nervous patient visits the dental surgery, and the child nervous patient visits the dental surgery were the titles of our fully immervice scenarios, where people can click on videos, answer questions and click on buttons to help the student make choices in the simulation!