Helping Dental Students Make Informed Decisions About Private Practice Employment Options in a Changing Landscape.

According to the 2014 American Dental Education Association (ADEA) Survey of Dental School Seniors, 45.3% of new graduates planned to enter private practice immediately after graduation; of those, while 65% planned to become an associate dentist in a private practice, 28.3% intended to enter a corporate group practice-the only category that saw an increase over the previous year. Current trends indicate that the number of new graduates choosing to enter some form of private practice without further education will continue to remain high, due in large part to the need to repay educational debt. In light of these trends, the question that must be asked is whether dental schools are optimally preparing students to make informed decisions regarding future employment options in the changing dental practice landscape. This article argues that dental schools should review their curricula to ensure graduates are being prepared for this changing environment and the increased business pressures associated with dental practice. Important considerations in preparing dental students to be successful in the process of selecting a practice model are identified.

Information-seeking strategies of dental hygienists.

As health care practitioners, dental hygienists need information-gathering skills and the confidence to both perform literature searches in Internet databases and assess the results in order to utilize the wealth of scientific literature that supports evidence-based practice. The aim of this study was to assess the information-seeking strategies of dental hygienists. A self-administered electronic survey of thirty-eight questions was sent to 5,007 licensed dental hygienists in District III of the American Dental Hygienists' Association. The overall response rate was 7.9 percent (396/5,007). Most (90.9 percent) of the respondents were currently practicing dental hygiene, with 62.9 percent having practiced more than ten years. Approximately 56 percent had graduated from a two-year dental hygiene program and had graduated before 1998. Nearly all of the respondents who graduated in 1999 or after were confident using a computer (96.2 percent) and the Internet (95.4 percent); lower percentages of the pre-1999 graduates expressed such confidence (68.6 percent using a computer and 80.7 percent using the Internet). Most respondents (90.9 percent) who graduated in 1999 or after reported receiving evidence-based decision making (EBDM) training in their dental hygiene program- an increase over the 51.8 percent of pre-1999 graduates who reported having received it-though lower percentages (78.2 and 48.0 percent, respectively) reported thinking their EBDM training was adequate. Though the response rate was low, these results may suggest that information-gathering skills are being more effectively addressed in recent dental hygiene education than previously. Continuing education courses that teach hands-on navigation of databases and methods to search the scientific literature and analytically appraise it could increase both the skills and comfort level of dental hygienists, especially those who graduated more than a decade ago.