Dental care is an everyday mundane matter, valued for its aesthetic properties, health benefits, and feelings of well-being. However, (Kristeva m.fl. 2018) when welfare services and healthcare professionals take over the daily care of the teeth it raises complex and ethical prioritization questions. Questions that contain both intimate, health-related, professional, systemic, and political dimensions. In our presentation, we will discuss the ‘messy’ practices, where welfare systems and standardized services go hand in hand with intimate bodily care work when older vulnerable people’s daily, preventive, and curative dental care is taken over by the Danish welfare system. Our point of departure is an ongoing research and co-creation project, Lifelong Oral Health, which we are involved in together with researchers from odontology and two Danish municipalities. The aim of the project is to improve oral health among older people in Danish eldercare. Through ethnographic fieldwork and co-creation activities at different kinds of care units (home care and nursing homes), we experience that prioritization of dental care constantly runs into complex dilemmas where resources (e.g., time and economy), values of good care, different forms of knowledge and policy processes intersect. Moreover, our case raises difficult ethical discussions about the complex situated entanglement between duty of care and neglect of care when e.g., the older person refuses or opposes dental care. And furthermore, we wish to discuss the methodological challenges of the co-creation ambition of the project when it constantly faces priority issues regarding distribution of responsibility between different professional groups and between municipal sections.