Inaugural scholarship awarded

20 April 2016
Volume 31 · Issue 6

The King’s College London Dental Institute is pleased to announce the inaugural award of the 2016 Patricia Santos Memorial Scholarship to two postgraduate dentists in the final year of their masters in Advanced Minimum Intervention Dentistry (AMID): Duvie Raju and Mark Sykes.

The students will be presented with the scholarship on April 28, 2016.

Denplan, Oral-B and GC Europe have generously provided combined industry funding to a maximum of £9,000 per cohort of PG AMID students. The Patricia Santos Memorial Scholarship was named in memory of the late Patricia Santos, an excellent dentist who enrolled onto the first cohort of the AMID masters programme and epitomised all that is good about the profession. The scholarship is competitively awarded to those students who have excelled in both the clinical and academic components of the programme, and is judged on the basis of cumulative results by the end of their second year.

The innovative and pioneering AMID programme delivers the latest evidence based knowledge in minimum intervention (MI) care and minimally invasive, tooth tissue preserving operative dentistry.

It’s anticipated that graduates of the AMID masters programme at King’s College London will develop an ethical as well as profitable network of MI centred oral healthcare clinics offering higher skill levels and greater expertise in prevention based patient care. A network of trained practitioners in the UK and abroad will encourage critically important practice based research for the future, building on the ever increasing evidence base for MI. This support of dental industry leaders/partners is therefore warmly welcomed.

Professor Avijit Banerjee, the originator and MSc AMID programme director, said: “With such high profile industry partners supporting this innovative PG programme with meritorious financial scholarships, it lays a firm foundation for the minimum intervention oral healthcare philosophy being on the UK and global oral health agenda, now and in the future. The oral healthcare industry, profession, patients and our students will all ultimately benefit tremendously from such support and collaboration.”

Roger Matthews, the retiring chief dental officer of Denplan said: "Quite simply, MI dentistry is a perfect fit for Denplan’s own philosophy of patient centred care with the emphasis on prevention. We have been working with Professor Avijit Banerjee and other MI experts for many years now, providing opportunities to promote MI principles within the industry and enabling Denplan members to benefit from their experience and knowledge of the subject. The AMID masters is a logical progression that will offer individuals with a keen interest in putting learned MI concepts into practice to do so with the support of a tremendous team of experts behind them."