Dentists striving to adopt a patient-centred care philosophy have the opportunity to study for the new Advanced Minimum Intervention Dentistry masters course at King’s College London. This distance learning course supports dentists in developing an ethical, sustainable and socially responsible business and oral healthcare model, putting each learned element immediately into practice in their daily working environment.
Although the qualification itself is for dentists, the three-year full time postgraduate programme is designed to involve and impact on the whole oral healthcare team and the community.
Unique
In 2009, Denplan invited Professor Hien Ngo, at that time working in Singapore and the foremost exponent of MI dentistry, to speak at the Denplan National Conference. The interest was so great that Professor Avijit Banerjee, who was also lecturing, offered to run the first series of clinical days on MI dentistry in the UK in 2011. These were so successful that further courses continued into 2012, supported by partners including Oral-B and GC UK.
Already a passionate advocate of minimum intervention methods, Professor Banerjee was enthused by the possibilities of extending MI into the academic field and promoting its advantages. The result is a truly unique and valuable MSc programme.
“Most postgraduate qualifications in dentistry are based on training clinicians to improve their operative skills to allow them to provide more effective and efficient treatments,” explains Professor Banerjee. “The AMID programme is unique in that it is the only one available that educates dentists and their teams to change completely the delivery of care they provide and the framework in which they provide it. It includes practice management, dental team development, the use of digital and social media to advertise ethically to and educate patients, as well as gaining the specialist knowledge and skills in practical operative minimally invasive dentistry.”
Goals
The goals for those registering on the course are primarily to improve patient- centred healthcare provision, with the collateral benefits including an increase in patient numbers, an improvement in satisfaction rates both for patients and staff, greater productivity with less stress and ultimately an increase in practice revenue.
All of these goals are, of course, supported by industry brands such as Denplan, GC and Oral-B, which have all committed to fund tuition fees for a full year of this valuable three-year masters programme for worthy students. There are three scholarships available:
- Denplan Scholarship
- GC Europe Scholarship
- Proctor and Gamble Oral-B Scholarship
Each will fund the third year of study and applicants are invited to submit a 400 word personal statement by December 31, 2014, to be ranked by the programme directors and company sponsors. The winners will be announced in March. For further information please go online: www.kcl.ac.uk/dentistry/study/distance/AMID/AMIDStructure.aspx
“Denplan, Oral-B and GC are all companies which recognise the potential of MI dentistry, which could best be described as working with patients, and not just on patients, to achieve optimal oral health,” says Denplan’s Roger Matthews. “MI dentistry is much more than preventive dentistry. Given the knowledge we now have about the development of dental diseases, we recognise that they are multi-factorial and individual to each patient. We also recognise that we have to work with the patient in order to achieve positive outcomes. Where treatment is necessary, it should do as little damage to the existing tooth structure as possible and should be done to exacting standards, using modern materials and supported by excellent home care.
“MI dentistry has an established and published record of success – the key is the co-operative approach between clinician and patient. This is something that the Denplan model of primary dental care supports so well.”
Flexible learning
The three-year AMID qualification combines distance learning with face-to-face courses where postgraduate students will receive hands-on clinical training in the state-of-the-art dental teaching facilities at King’s College London Dental Institute at Guy’s Hospital. The units and modules of the course have been designed so that they seamlessly integrate with daily practice and allow the student to work at a pace that suits their work schedule. “Assignments for the Masters are tailored to be of benefit not only with regard to academic content,” says Professor
Banerjee, “but also useful for real practice and practical skill development. What is learned in one session can be put into practice the very next day.”
Expertly created
The curriculum includes the scientific basis of contemporary cariology and disease pathology; contemporary detection, diagnosis, risk assessment and care planning for patients; medico-legal risk management; prevention and control management strategies (including tooth repair technologies such as remineralisation and other contemporary approaches) for patient groups and individuals; developing targeted digital marketing strategies to promote your oral healthcare practice, oral health and the MI care philosophy to patients using the latest social media frameworks; practice and business management skills; minimally invasive tooth preserving operative technologies (for example air-abrasion); aesthetic clinical management of patients with caries and other restorative or aesthetic problems and learning research methodology to enable completion of a useful practice-based research
project in the third year.
Professor Banerjee has enlisted the skills of like-minded advocates of MI dentistry to contribute to the expert teaching of the course, including Professor Hien Ngo, Louis McKenzie, Michael Thomas and Bhupinder Dawett. While Len D’Cruz has developed the MI medico-legal/ethics risk management unit. All share Professor Banerjee’s passion and belief in MI dentistry as the oral healthcare philosophy with patients’ best and long term interests at its heart.
Industry support
It is anticipated that graduates of the course will gradually develop a profitable network of MI-centred oral healthcare clinics, offering higher skill levels and greater expertise in patient care and encouraging further useful practice based research for the future, building on the ever increasing evidence base for MI. The support of dental industry leaders is therefore warmly welcomed.
“With such high profile partners supporting this new and innovative programme with scholarships and excellence awards, it lays a foundation for the minimum intervention philosophy being on the global oral health agenda,” says Michael Thomas, deputy programme director. “The dental industry, academia and our students will benefit tremendously from such support.”