PubMed · 288021
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R L Patterson. Missionary dentistry.. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/288021/
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OBJECTIVE: To examine the effect of a community dental service (CDS) outreach teaching programme on undergraduates' confidence to undertake a range of paediatric dental procedures. METHOD: Eighteen final year dental students completed a questionnaire prior to, and following participation in an outreach teaching programme. At each time point, the students were asked to identify how confident they felt to carry out a range of procedures commonly encountered in the treatment of children, employing a Likert scale modified to comprise six points where a rating of 1 represented 'not at all confident' and a rating of 6 'very confident'. RESULTS: The distribution of scores at each time point indicated that students were more confident to carry out each of the listed procedures following participation in the outreach teaching programme than they had been on completion of their paediatric dentistry sessions within the School of Dentistry. At the individual student level, 16 of the 18 students indicated that they were, overall, more confident following their placement than previously. CONCLUSIONS: It can be concluded that the long-established CDS outreach teaching programme run by the School of Dentistry, Wales College of Medicine in conjunction with the staff of Cardiff and Vale NHS Trust is a valuable adjunct to undergraduate teaching in paediatric dentistry.
This paper briefly describes the US system for dental care services; asserts that there is much to be learned by considering the experience of other countries; identifies a few lessons that may be learned from comparisons with England, Australia, and other nations; and encourages the monitoring of outcomes associated with innovations in financing and delivery of services elsewhere. Oral health is affected by more factors than access to dental care. Because so many factors at the individual, environmental, and delivery system levels affect oral health, interpreting the findings from international studies is difficult. Furthermore, the findings of these international studies are confounded by significant intra-country variation in outcomes and expectations. While public funding and the public provision of services (such as programs in schools or community health centers) can be powerful instruments of change, they have their limitations. Examination of all types of public subsidization of dental care may reveal inadvertent distributions that may increase disparities. The discovery of best practices and lessons learned in the financing and organization of dental care may begin by comparing US experiences with those of other countries.