Dental Students’ Clinical Expectations and Experiences Treating Persons with Disabilities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Persons with disabilities (PWDs) have a disproportionate level of dental disease relative to the general population. Access to care is a cause along with dentists' willingness to treat PWDs. The aim of this study was to investigate the expectations and experiences of dental students in providing treatment to these patients in a hospital-based dental clinic for PWDs. Senior dental students at the Faculty of Dentistry, University of Toronto (n=92) were surveyed prior to (Phase I) and at the end of (Phase II) mandatory clinical rotations at the Mount Sinai Hospital's Dentistry Clinic for Persons with Special Needs. Response rates were 88% for Phase I and 58% for Phase II. Before the rotations, 70% of the respondents reported little or no experience with PWDs, and 46% said they did not feel comfortable providing basic dental treatment to PWDs. However, in Phase II, significantly more students reported being comfortable than in Phase I (p=0.001). Overall, the majority of respondents (Phase I 95%; Phase II 98%) indicated they would at least attempt to provide basic dental care to PWDs after graduation. The majority also identified the opportunity to provide care and interact with PWDs as the most enjoyable aspect of their experience at the clinic. They reported that the experience helped reduce their concerns about treating PWDs including being more realistic about the time required and ideal quality of the treatment they could provide. These results suggest that their experience in the clinic significantly increased students' comfort in treating PWDs. The respondents expressed a willingness to treat PWDs once graduated and generally identified their experience as being more positive than their expectations.
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.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".