The effect of a community dental service outreach programme on the confidence of undergraduate students to treat children: a pilot study.

Full Abstract

OBJECTIVE:
To examine the effect of a community dental service (CDS) outreach teaching programme on undergraduates' confidence to undertake a range of paediatric dental procedures.

METHOD:
Eighteen final year dental students completed a questionnaire prior to, and following participation in an outreach teaching programme. At each time point, the students were asked to identify how confident they felt to carry out a range of procedures commonly encountered in the treatment of children, employing a Likert scale modified to comprise six points where a rating of 1 represented 'not at all confident' and a rating of 6 'very confident'.

RESULTS:
The distribution of scores at each time point indicated that students were more confident to carry out each of the listed procedures following participation in the outreach teaching programme than they had been on completion of their paediatric dentistry sessions within the School of Dentistry. At the individual student level, 16 of the 18 students indicated that they were, overall, more confident following their placement than previously.

CONCLUSIONS:
It can be concluded that the long-established CDS outreach teaching programme run by the School of Dentistry, Wales College of Medicine in conjunction with the staff of Cardiff and Vale NHS Trust is a valuable adjunct to undergraduate teaching in paediatric dentistry.

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Author information

Author/s: Hunter, M Lindsay (ML); Oliver, Richard (R); Lewis, Rosamund (R);

Affiliation: School of Dentistry, Heath Park, Cardiff, UK. hunterml(-atsign-)cf.ac.uk

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article

Journal: European journal of dental education : official journal of the Association for Dental Education in Europe (Eur J Dent Educ), published in Denmark. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2007-Feb; vol 11 (issue 1) : pp 10-3

Dates: Created 2007/01/17; Completed 2007/03/13;

PMID: 17227390, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 12/26/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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