The Educational System's Integration of Evidenced-Based Principles: What are the Obstacles in the Dental School Environment?

Abstract

The overwhelming majority of Dental Schools in North America use competency-based curricula. Very few dental schools, however, have implemented Problem-Based Learning (PBL). The PBL system is time intensive, requires significant faculty resources, and relies on the ability of facilitators to meet educational objectives with small groups of students. In dental schools, Evidenced-Based Dentistry (EBD) has been subject to the same lack of implementation as PBL. While the concept of EBD is easily understood, the mechanics of its implementation in patient care is not. When the teaching of EBD occurs, it is taught as a didactic course with little implementation within clinical courses whose purpose is patient care. Factors that slow the integration of EBD into the clinical curricula are multifactorial and include EBD implementation in dental practices, clinical faculty and administrators, postand predoctoral students, educational resources, and available curriculum time. The purpose of this paper is to describe obstacles that retard EBD implementation into clinical curricula and to provide solutions that the UCLA School of Dentistry is pursuing with the work of transitional and clinical researchers.