The Future of Clinician-Scientists in Canada

Scientific research is an integral part of dentistry, bringing us new knowledge and different approaches to providing better patient care. Clinicians — our front-line health care providers — are in a unique position to raise novel scientific questions from clinical cases and to bring solutions from benchside to chairside. Yet the shortage of clinician-scientists has been a common theme in our Canadian dental schools in recent years. With the greying of faculty members, the challenge to sustain the existing level of clinician-scientists becomes even more difficult. How can we alleviate this growing concern? The answer seems to lie with the ability of universities to attract dental students into careers in academia — and to prepare them for such careers. Through my own experience and discussions with my fellow-students, there appear to be some common issues that deter students from becoming clinician-scientists. First, the financial burden of today’s dental students is a lot more than that of graduates from a decade ago. With rising tuition fees (which have almost doubled in the past 5 years), the average student will have a debt of about $100,000 or more by the time he or she graduates. The financial incentives of practising dentistry outweigh those of an academic career, especially in the early years following graduation when students are trying to repay their loans. Once students leave an academic institution, it becomes more difficult for them to return. 1,2 Further, the average age of graduating students is late 20s, when many are trying to start families. They believe the long hours required to establish a research program would not be compatible with family life. This perception is related to another problem: the lack of role models in our schools to mentor students into becoming clinicianscientists. The DDS/PhD who practises dentistry and is actively engaged in research is increasingly rare. Although the future looks bleak for our dental faculties, there are ways in which this crisis can be overcome. In the U.S., the National Institutes of Health (NIH) offers dental scientist fellowships that provide tuition support for dental students if they commit to a research career. 3 Should the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) follow suit, this would help Canadian dental students become clinicianscientists by assisting them with their financial burden. This is not a novel idea in Canada. The Canadian Armed Forces have a Dental Officer Training Plan that helps subsidize dental education, in exchange for a period of service upon graduation. 4 The military usually has more applications than positions available. Sometimes, monetary rewards are not enough to persuade students to select a career in academic dentistry. A stimulating intellectual environment is also an important driving force in nurturing students to become clinician-scientists. One approach is to expose students to scientific research in the early stages of their education. I spent the summer break during my undergraduate years working in various research

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.