Teaching special care dentistry in the undergraduate curriculum: Challenges, opportunities, and the road forward
Bibliographic record
Abstract
World over, there is a growing awareness of the gaps in dental treatment of persons living with disabilities. Special care dentistry is that branch of dentistry that provides oral care services for people with physical, medical, developmental, or cognitive conditions which limit their ability to receive routine dental care. The teaching of special care dentistry at the undergraduate level though remains a subject that is under addressed in literature and rarely taught formally. How we view disability is often a combination of cultural and social factors. For example, while the 2017 Canadian survey on disability found that nearly 18% of Canadians identified themselves as disabled,[1] the 2016 Saudi Survey found that only 3.3% of Saudi citizens considered themselves to be disabled.[2] Regardless of these discrepancies, most of the disabilities reported are related to age, and with life expectancy increasing the world over, it is reasonable to expect that the graduating dentist needs to be competent to provide comprehensive dental care to individuals living with disabilities, both transient and permanent. It is ironic then that much of the education in providing this care is delivered as a part of the pediatric dental curriculum. While the pediatric dentist is certainly competent to provide comprehensive care to children with special health-care needs and children living with disabilities, the provision of dental care to adults living with disabilities presents its own unique challenges. From endodontia to exodontia, the scope of practice of the adult special care dentist is very different from that of the pediatric dentist! The International Association for Disability and Oral Health (IADH) in 2012 developed an undergraduate curriculum for special care dentistry.[3] The curriculum outlined essential skills and competencies for the graduating dentist in the provision of dental care to individuals living with disability. This curriculum was designed so that it could be adapted to the needs of each country, and it has been adopted, in part or wholly in different countries such as Ireland, Australia, and Malaysia. A recent study in Canada showed that the IADH curriculum could easily be integrated into the curriculum of Canadian dental schools.[4] It is interesting to note that even in the United States, where special care dentistry is not a recognized dental specialty; the Committee on Dental Accreditation has mandated that graduating dental students be competent in the provision of dental care to individuals with intellectual disabilities. Societies such as the Arab Society for Disability and Oral Health possess the knowledge and human resources needed to develop a customized special care dentistry curriculum for the region. There is a need to formally integrate special care dentistry education into the undergraduate dental curriculum, and dental schools across the region need to unite to achieve this timely necessity.
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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 | 0.021 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.020 |
| Research integrity | 0.014 | 0.020 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.028 | 0.009 |
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".