Educating North Carolina's Oral Health Workforce in an Evolving Environment

In 2014, North Carolina had 4,681 actively practicing dentists and ranked 47th among US states in dentist-to-population ratio. The need for dentists is increasing as the population grows, and underserved areas persist. This commentary discusses the impact of the state's 2 dental schools and external factors on dental workforce trends.

Shaping oral health care in North Carolina with East Carolina University's community service learning centers

East Carolina University School of Dental Medicine is responding to the changes in today's health care system by implementing an innovative model of community-based dental education that prepares tomorrow's dentists to meet North Carolina's future oral health challenges while also providing much-needed care in many underserved areas.

The East Carolina University School of Dental Medicine's approach to dental workforce education and reaching underserved areas

Access to preventive and oral health care services in many areas of our state remains problematic. This paper discusses oral health needs of North Carolinians and how a new model of dental education at East Carolina University addresses these issues by providing care where it is most needed.

East Carolina University School of Dentistry: impact on access disparities

Under the "Plan for Dentistry in North Carolina," the existing dental school will increase its class size and enhance its research efforts and a new dental school will be opened on the campus of East Carolina University. These initiatives are designed to address a growing gap between oral health needs and capacity to meet that need in the state, especially in rural areas. The new school will focus on educating well-qualified primary care dentists who desire to address the challenges of providing care in the rural and underserved areas of the state. This paper describes the objectives, quality, research, patient care model, economic model, recruitment and financial considerations for students, and community benefits of the program. A key feature of the ECU program will be the fourth-year experience in Service Learning Centers located in rural communities.

Does faculty development enhance teaching effectiveness?

Academic dentists and members of the practice community have been hearing, for more than a decade, that our educational system is in trouble and that the profession has lost its vision and may be wavering in the achievement of its goals. A core of consistently recommended reforms has framed the discussion of future directions for dental education, but as yet, most schools report little movement toward implementation of these reforms in spite of persistent advocacy. Provision of faculty development related to teaching and assessment strategies is widely perceived to be the essential ingredient in efforts to introduce new curricular approaches and modify the educational environment in academic dentistry. Analyses of the outcomes of efforts to revise health professions curricula have identified the availability and effectiveness of faculty development as a predictor of the success or failure of reform initiatives. This article will address faculty development for purposes of enhancing teaching effectiveness and preparing instructors for potential new roles associated with curriculum changes. Its overall purpose is to provide information and insights about faculty development that may be useful to dental schools in designing professional growth opportunities for their faculty. Seven questions are addressed: 1) What is faculty development? 2) How is faculty development accomplished? 3) Why is faculty development particularly important in dental education? 4) What happens when faculty development does not accompany educational reform? 5) Why are teaching attitudes and behaviors so difficult to change? 6) What outcomes can be expected from faculty development? and 7) What does the available evidence tell us about the design of faculty development programs? Evidence from systematic reviews pertaining to the teaching of evidence-based dentistry, strategies for continuing professional education, and the Best Evidence in Medical Education review of faculty development outcomes are presented to answer this question: does faculty development enhance teaching effectiveness? Characteristics consistently associated with effective faculty development are described.

The dental education environment

The second in a series of perspectives from the ADEA Commission on Change and Innovation in Dental Education (CCI), this article presents the CCI's view of the dental education environment necessary for effective change. The article states that the CCI's purpose is related to leading and building consensus in the dental community to foster a continuous process of innovative change in the education of general dentists. Principles proposed by CCI to shape the dental education environment are described; these are critical thinking, lifelong learning, humanistic environment, scientific discovery and integration of knowledge, evidence-based oral health care, assessment, faculty development, and the health care team. The article also describes influences external to the academic dental institutions that are important for change and argues that meaningful and long-lasting change must be systemic in nature. The CCI is ADEA's primary means to engage all stakeholders for the purpose of educating lifelong learners to provide evidence-based care to meet the needs of society.

Educational strategies associated with development of problem-solving, critical thinking, and self-directed learning

This article was developed for the Commission on Change and Innovation in Dental Education (CCI), established by the American Dental Education Association. CCI was created because numerous organizations within organized dentistry and the educational community have initiated studies or proposed modifications to the process of dental education, often working to achieve positive and desirable goals but without coordination or communication. The fundamental mission of CCI is to serve as a focal meeting place where dental educators and administrators, representatives from organized dentistry, the dental licensure community, the Commission on Dental Accreditation, the ADA Council on Dental Education and Licensure, and the Joint Commission on National Dental Examinations can meet and coordinate efforts to improve dental education and the nation's oral health. One of the objectives of the CCI is to provide guidance to dental schools related to curriculum design. In pursuit of that objective, this article summarizes the evidence related to this question: What are educational best practices for helping dental students acquire the capacity to function as an entry-level general dentist or to be a better candidate to begin advanced studies? Three issues are addressed, with special emphasis on the third: 1) What constitutes expertise, and when does an individual become an expert? 2) What are the differences between novice and expert thinking? and 3) What educational best practices can help our students acquire mental capacities associated with expert function, including critical thinking and self-directed learning? The purpose of this review is to provide a benchmark that faculty and academic planners can use to assess the degree to which their curricula include learning experiences associated with development of problem-solving, critical thinking, self-directed learning, and other cognitive skills necessary for dental school graduates to ultimately become expert performers as they develop professionally in the years after graduation.

The case for change in dental education

This article introduces a series of white papers developed by the ADEA Commission on Change and Innovation (CCI) to explore the case for change in dental education. This preamble to the series argues that there is a compelling need for rethinking the approach to dental education in the United States. Three issues facing dental education are explored: 1) the challenging financial environment of higher education, making dental schools very expensive and tuition-intensive for universities to operate and producing high debt levels for students that limit access to education and restrict career choices; 2) the profession's apparent loss of vision for taking care of the oral health needs of all components of society and the resultant potential for marginalization of dentistry as a specialized health care service available only to the affluent; and 3) the nature of dental school education itself, which has been described as convoluted, expensive, and often deeply dissatisfying to its students.

Model practice as a valid research tool for studying actual private practice

Data from the actual private practices of two dentists were compared with respective data from the participation of the same two dentists in a laboratory model of private practice conducted in the University of North Carolina Dental Research Center. The findings show that a laboratory model can be established which accurately reflects the major parameters of an actual private practice.