Leadership training for oral health professionals: a call to action.

With dramatic changes in the scope and mode of delivering oral health care on the horizon, a strategic approach to addressing the emerging opportunities and challenges is required. Such an approach will demand new and sustained initiatives to develop leaders with the skills, knowledge, and passion to guide oral health care into the future. The purpose of this position paper is to define the need for leadership training programs for dental and dental hygiene students to become future leaders. Whether these oral health professionals become leaders within a solo or group practice or at the local or national level of their profession, they must be given the mindset and tools to lead. This position paper will describe goals for leadership training and give examples of some programs that currently exist in dental education and other professional settings as the background for a call to action for dental education to provide leadership training opportunities for its students.

Program design considerations for leadership training for dental and dental hygiene students.

Since leadership is an essential part of the oral health professions, oral health educators can play an essential role in establishing a culture of leadership and in mentoring students to prepare them for future leadership roles within the profession. However, leadership training for oral health professionals is a relatively new concept and is frequently not found within dental and dental hygiene curricula. The purpose of this article is to propose several models for leadership training that are specific to the oral health professions. The authors hope that providing an overview of leadership programs in academic dental institutions will encourage all U.S. and Canadian dental schools to begin developing a culture that promotes leadership development.