Dr Ava Carter's Churchill Fellowship Report: Making the Case for Mouth and Mind

We are proud to announce that Dr Ava Carter, Consultant Psychiatrist at Deakin Private Hospital, has published her 2024 Churchill Fellowship report — A Case for Psychostomatology — a landmark piece of research that is already generating significant conversation across Australia's mental health and dental communities.

Awarded by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, the fellowship gave Dr Ava the opportunity to travel across five countries — Germany, Norway, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States — to explore one of healthcare's most overlooked intersections: the relationship between oral health and mental health.

A preventable crisis hiding in plain sight

The findings are striking. People living with severe mental illness are 2.8 times more likely to suffer from oral disease, twice as likely to lose all their teeth, and significantly less likely to access routine dental care. In 2023–24 alone, approximately 88,600 Australians were hospitalised for preventable dental conditions — at an estimated cost of $195 million in avoidable expenditure.

Yet despite oral disease accounting for 2.3% of Australia's total disease burden, government spending on dental health sits at just 1.3% of the national health budget. For Dr Ava, that gap is not just a funding problem. It is a clinical one.

"People with severe mental illness deserve better than a system that sends them home from an emergency department with antibiotics and analgesics, only to return weeks later with a worse infection and greater distress."

113 interviews. Five countries. One conclusion.

Drawing on 113 interviews with clinicians, lived experience experts, researchers, and patients, Dr Ava's report presents 36 evidence-based recommendations for integrating oral and mental health care across Australia — from immediate, low-cost actions like providing oral hygiene kits to psychiatric inpatients, through to longer-term systemic reforms including the appointment of a national Chief Dental Officer.

The report also introduces the concept of psychostomatology — the formal integration of oral health across psychiatry, medicine, psychology, and surgery — as a framework for whole-person care.

Whole-person care at Deakin Private

Dr Ava's research reflects the values that sit at the heart of Deakin Private Hospital's approach to mental health treatment. We believe that exceptional psychiatric care means treating the whole person — and we are proud to have clinicians whose curiosity, dedication, and expertise are helping to shape the future of that care at a national level.

We congratulate Dr Ava on this significant achievement and look forward to seeing her recommendations drive real change across the sector.

Read Dr Ava Carter's full Churchill Fellowship report at churchilltrust.com.au/fellow/ava-carter-act-2024/