Program Mission and Goals
The program mission is to train dentists, who have a broad scope of clinical experience and skills in advanced procedures, including Hospital Dentistry and the appropriate treatment of special needs patients. Subsequently these individuals either: (A) go on to successfully practice broad scope general dentistry, or (B) pursue advanced specialty training in their perceived area of expertise.
Program goals shall include, but not limited to, the ability to:
- Act as primary care provider for individual and group patients. This includes: providing emergency and multidisciplinary comprehensive oral health care; promotion of oral health care and disease prevention activities; and the use of advanced dental treatment modalities.
- Plan and provide multidisciplinary oral health care for a wide variety of patients including patients with special needs – medically, mentally and pharmacologically compromised patients.
- Manage the delivery of oral health care to adult and pediatric patients by applying concepts of practice management, and quality improvement that are responsive to a dynamic health care environment.
- Function effectively within the hospital environment, including ER, OR, ICU and SDCU.
- Function effectively with other interdisciplinary health care teams in providing medically necessary dental care, as well as, promoting oral health care and disease prevention to the community which it serves.
- Apply scientific principles to learning while providing effective oral health care. This includes the use of critical thinking, evidence of outcomes-based clinical decision-making, and technology-based information retrieval systems.
- Utilize the values of professional ethics, lifelong learning, patient centered care, adaptability, and the acceptance of cultural diversity in the professional practice.