The councils risk leaving communities further exposed as services brace for problems exacerbated by the pandemic.

New La Trobe University Bendigo research shows many fail to mention oral health in their municipal public health and wellbeing plans.

Of the 20 that do mention oral health in the key health strategy document, only four go further than describing problems their communities face, senior researcher Virginia Dickson-Swift said.

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"These plans are councils' opportunity to raise awareness about the issues in their local government area," she said.

Dr Dickson-Swift said people living in rural and regional Victoria had more caries than those in urban areas.

They were often more severe or untreated.

Those sorts of health problems persist in rural parts of the City of Greater Bendigo's municipality too, Heathcote Health chief executive Dan Douglass said.

Both fear that the pandemic is exacerbating existing challenges in the area as people delay non-essential health treatment or negotiate tighter health protocols.

Mr Douglass warned that councils with large rural populations would see some problems play out sooner rather than later.

"For younger children oral health is just so important. You are only young for a short period of time and if you get bad teeth it carries on for you into later life," he said.

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Mr Douglass and Dr Dickson-Swift have given early feedback to the council about the importance of oral health as it works on a number of new health strategies.

"Bendigo has done a lot of work to get oral health onto the agenda. They have been really proactive," Dr Dickson-Swift said.

That was partly because Heathcote is yet to get a fluoridated water supply.

Dr Dickson-Swift said that was one of the best ways to improve oral health outcomes and was one that councils often needed to play a key role advocating to the state government for.

"If communities are not advocating and lobbying for it, it just isn't going to happen," she said.

All councils have access to oral health profiles for their communities through Dental Health Services Victoria.

"They just don't use it to build cases for why they should advocate," Dr Dickson-Swift said.

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"What tends to happen is that councils are kind of mandated to deal with healthy eating and active living. So they focus on things like obesity and physical activity.

"That's fine. It needs to happen. But they don't think about oral health as a specific action area. They kind of think that if they get the healthy eating and active living right then good oral health will flow out of that."

That would not necessarily happen, Dr Dickson-Swift said.

Even in Heathcote, where the council and health services wanted to be on the front foot, the town was dealing with outcomes much worse than the state average.

"I think that it comes back to this idea that the mouth is a dentist's business. We don't think of oral health as a holistic overall approach to a healthy life," Dr Dickson said.

"Internationally, it's an issue. People talk about the integration of oral health into primary health care as if that's new. Whereas that's the way it should be."

Dr Dickson-Swift and co-author Leonard Crocombe's research appears in the Health Promotion Journal of Australia.

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