In September of last year I completed a three-year, full-time masters in clinical dentistry in periodontology. The course was at the UCL Eastman Dental Institute and is probably the best periodontal programme in the UK. It has international lecturers and it is EFP (European Federation of Periodontology) accredited, which means that the quality, content and competencies of the postgraduate programme are recognised in many countries in Europe.
The full-time programme is very intensive. You have to work hard every day of the week, and there is typically more work that needs to be put in after hours as well. It was an academic programme with a very strong evidence-based clinical component.
Starting off with a greater academic focus, the first year of the course teaches delegates about the concepts involved. You are also treating patients, but on a less complex level. In the second year, you get exposed to implant dentistry and regenerative therapies, which are the more advanced therapies that you would be performing as a specialist in periodontology. The third and final year of the course is spent fine-tuning knowledge and skills to ensure delegates can work with them in the practice appropriately, along with sitting their exams.
I was particularly impressed with the calibre of academic staff of the department. They had an in-house team of something like eight to 10 lecturers and, because of the connections and the prestige of the department’s programme director and his team, it attracted visiting lecturers and researchers from around the world.
The combination of the academic staff and those experts enhanced significantly the quality of the programme. They’ve been that way for a long period of time; they’re household names within the periodontal community and it added a lot of validity to the programme itself.
Prof Nikos Donos, the programme director and head of the department, has established an open door policy and the academic tutors were very accessible. The academic staff of the department are really friendly and approachable.
The benefits to patients’ oral health, keeping teeth long term and general wellbeing, are significant. Patients are seeing direct rewards and so are their families. A lot of gum disease is familial, so it’s not unusual for me to treat a patient and then have other members of the family come to make an appointment.
Being an Eastman course brought its own advantages. There is a prestige to the actual programme. Eastman is really well known internationally, and its reputation has been enhanced more recently with the significant number of research papers and invited lectures to international congresses. But also being an Eastman graduate from the department of periodontology opens doors both in terms of jobs and in terms of lecturing. I got onto the specialist list relatively recently, and already I have been invited to lecture at various places and I think it’s related to the fact that I graduated well from the periodontology department at the UCL Eastman Dental Institute. In a sense, it is a life-time professional guarantee.