Pediatric Dentistry Clinical Education Venues Evaluation by Pre and Post-Doctoral Students

Objective: To evaluate dental students’ perspectives about pre- and post-doctoral pediatric dentistry education venues. Study design: Surveys with visual analog scales (from 0 to100) measuring the educational contribution of pediatric dentistry venues were conducted. The pre-doctoral venues included a 3^rd year university twilight clinic (UTC), a 3^rd year urban community based clinic (CBC) and 4^th year mobile clinics (MCs). The post-doctoral venues included treatment of children under general anesthesia, oral sedations, a regular clinic (no sedations), seminars, journal club, case conferences and studding for the American Board of Pediatric Dentistry. Results: Analyses of variance between the scores indicated that the 3rd year CBC score (68.2 ± 4.5) was statistically significant higher (p= .007) than the one for the 3^rd year UTC score (44.9±6.1). The 4th year students’ MCs score (61.4±4.0) was statistically significant higher than their retrospective scores for the 3^rd year CBC (56.4±4.4) or UTC (42.2±4.9) scores (p= .03 and .004 respectively). Among the didactic or clinical post-doctoral venues, the regular clinic and the seminars received the highest scores (84.3±1.7 and 71.6±2.8 respectively). Conclusion: pre-doctoral community-based clinical education and post-doctoral regular university based clinic are considered by students to provide the main contribution to pediatric dental education.

Education, Dentistry, Pediatric Dentistry

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