Using program yield to guide dental educational process improvement

Abstract

Dental education is a complex system of activities repeated on an annual cycle. Small adjustments are constant in an effort to improve the overall performance of the process. While it is possible to evaluate each change in isolation against standards particular to their circumstances, it is ultimately necessary to ensure that the set of changes has an overall positive impact on the program as a whole.Approach: It is valuable to have a school-wide criterion for choosing the best portfolio of constituent activities. This perspective piece describes the use of one such standard: program yield, defined as the proportion of students who are recognized as competent practitioners within a few months of the anticipated graduation date. The success of one program that used this approach is described.It is also suggested that dental education is a cyclical process that involves the four classical components of the quality movement. These are described as Goal, Experience, Assessment, and Refection in this paper. Impact: This is the first of three related perspectives. The other two are devoted to quality assurance and improvement and the challenge of transferring innovations published in the literature to application in other schools. The common theme in these perspectives is the value of driving improvement in dental education by focus on the outcome variable.