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:

  1. 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.
  2. Plan and provide multidisciplinary oral health care for a wide variety of patients including patients with special needs – medically, mentally and pharmacologically compromised patients.
  3. 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.
  4. Function effectively within the hospital environment, including ER, OR, ICU and SDCU.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. Utilize the values of professional ethics, lifelong learning, patient centered care, adaptability, and the acceptance of cultural diversity in the professional practice.