Mapping the graduating European dentist to established undergraduate dental education activities at Trinity College Dublin.

INTRODUCTION: "The Graduating European Dentist" Curriculum (GED) was adopted in 2020 by the Irish Dental Council as its new expectation for competencies. The Dublin Dental University Hospital (DDUH) sought to map the teaching activities for its undergraduate dental training programme to the GED. This paper describes the process developed for curriculum mapping. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Guided by historical mapping data and materials on the DDUH's virtual learning environment; teaching activities in a bespoke curriculum mapping system were edited, added and/or deleted to match existing teaching activities currently delivered by staff to students. These activities were then remapped to GED Learning Outcomes. Staff members with oversight responsibilities for a collection of activities then received and provided feedback on reports tabulating the preliminary map. Feedback from staff members around their activities was accommodated to produce an accurate reflection of teaching activities across the 5 years program. RESULTS: A process for mapping existing teaching activities to a new set of curriculum expectations using a bespoke application and several other widely available technologies was established. Informal feedback from staff has been positive and has raised ideas for future opportunities to improve the alignment of educational activities with learning outcomes. CONCLUSION: Other dental schools may find this accounting of the DDUH's efforts useful in guiding their own curriculum mapping.

Can a virtual learning module foster empathy in dental undergraduate students?

BACKGROUND: Empathy is an essential part of patient-centred health care, which positively benefits both patients and clinicians. There is little agreement regarding how best to design and deliver training for healthcare trainees to impart the skills and behaviours of clinical empathy. The study aimed to inform the field by sharing an educational intervention where we aimed to improve empathy amongst dental undergraduate students in Trinity College Dublin using a virtual learning module. METHODS: Adopting pre-post-repeat pre-experimental design, dental professional students completed the Jefferson Scale of Empathy (JSE) for Health Professional Students immediately prior to and after a three-week virtual programme designed to increase clinical empathy. Using a three-factor model described for the JSE in the literature, scores were evaluated for internal consistency and paired tests were performed on scores appropriate to their distributions. Seven-point Likert scales were scored to record student experience of training and technology, which are reported descriptively. RESULTS: Most of the 37 participants were female (76%) and represented dental science (N = 27) and dental hygiene roles (N = 7). Results revealed a mean JSE-HPS scale score rise from 110.0 (SD = 10.4) to 116.4 (SD = 11.1), which represented a rise of 5.8% (t (36) = 3.6, p = 0.001). The three factors associated with cognitive empathy, namely perspective-taking (T(36) = 3.931, p < 0.001; walking in the patient's shoes T(36) = 2.093, p = 0.043); and compassionate care (Z = 2.469, p = 0.014) were all found to have increased after the intervention. Students reported a positive experience of discipline-specific and generic videos as part of the module. CONCLUSION: The study demonstrated that a virtual educational module was associated with an increase in empathy amongst dental undergraduate students. The design of a blended module incorporating the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) and virtual learning are beneficial and have a promising future.

The Impact of the First Wave of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Providing Special Care Dentistry: A Survey for Dentists.

This study aimed to investigate the impact of COVID-19 on the experiences of special care dentistry providers worldwide. An online survey was administered from 10 to 31 July 2020. Age, sex, years of professional activity, COVID-19 status, geographical area of origin and length of lockdown period were recorded for all participating dentists. The relationships between these variables and the changes in clinical activity, the treated patients' COVID-19 status and the implementation of protective measures in the dental clinic were analyzed. A total of 436 (70.6% women) dentists from 59 countries responded to the survey. Clinical activity was reduced or stopped for 79.1% of respondents. The most common change was to limit treatment to urgent care only (53.7%). Treatment under general anesthesia or deep sedation was discontinued (51.0%) or reduced (35.8%) for the majority of respondents. Male dentists were more likely to maintain their clinical activity than female dentists (p < 0.001), and respondents from North America were more likely to do so than participants from other geographical regions (p < 0.001). Dentists from Latin America and the Caribbean were more likely to report treatment of confirmed cases of COVID-19 than those from Europe (p < 0.001). The implementation of protective measures in the dental office was determined by the survey participant's sex, intensity of clinical activity and geographical area of origin. To conclude, the provision of special care dentistry was considerably reduced in response to the pandemic. Service maintenance was mainly related to the geographical area in which the surveyed dentists worked, further exacerbating pre-existing inequalities.