A population-based planning approach to professional dental education

Abstract

Dentistry is confronting rapid changes in its environment. Technological advancements, innovations in the traditional delivery system, and epidemiological and demographic changes are all factors that have a direct and very powerful effect on today's practicing dentist.I While virtually all components of the health care system are faced with similar changes, it has been proposed that, within dentistry, the challenges are perhaps the most dramatic.2If the profession is to be responsive to the factors that influence it, the educational systems that prepare its members for the practice of dentistry must reflect these societal and clinical changes. These systems include not only undergraduate and graduate dental education, but continuing educa- 29