Jacksonville Dental Clinic wins reaccreditation with nine commendations
For the administrators of dental education clinics, reaccreditation, like the seven-year itch, can be prickly business.
The Commission on Dental Accreditation — or, CODA — is the arm of the American Dental Association charged with ensuring programs adhere to nationally-accepted standards in dental education and patient care. CODA site visitors review clinics every seven years and issue reports based on their findings. Recommendations are bad, while suggestions are neutral and commendations are good.
The CODA site visitor who reviewed UF College of Dentistry’s Jacksonville clinic last February reported nine commendations for the clinic and zero recommendations or suggestions.
Commendations were given for the quality and collegiality of the faculty, staff and students; the outstanding educational experience for residents, including treatment planning, practice management, and implant dentistry; program support from the local dental community, many members of which also were courtesy faculty; and the availability of new technology and quality of clinical experience for the residents.
Much of this program success can be attributed to clinic Director Clifford B. Starr, D.M.D., and Assistant Director Nancy Jacobson, D.M.D. Their backgrounds, while very different, are complementary — Starr is a retired Air Force colonel with a spit-n-polish approach to dental education and Jacobson’s forte is personalized clinical supervision of patient care while working with the advanced education general dentistry residents.
“I love observing, what I call, the ‘Aha!’ moment,” Jacobson said. “The residents get very sophisticated in a short period of time and they don’t realize how sophisticated they really are until they see the new class come in.”
Each year, six general dentistry residents and two foreign trained dentists enter the Jacksonville Dental Clinic’s residency program. Residents come to the clinic already having earned their dental degrees and with a desire to learn advanced general dentistry in the specialty areas of endodontics, implants, and prosthodontics. When they complete the one-year program, they will be “Super Dentists” prepared to provide advanced care to patients.
Advanced general dentists fill an important niche, especially when serving in rural areas and/or caring for indigent patients. Because the oral health of many of the patients coming into the Jacksonville Dental Clinic is severely compromised, residents experience a broad range of clinical treatment experiences. These include endodontic root canals, tooth extractions and fitting of prosthetic dentures, and the latest in dental technology — implanted tooth replacements.
Typically, courtesy faculty donate one or two days a month to the clinic, but residents often visit the dentists’ private offices to observe patient treatment or consult on special cases.
The accrediting team also commended the role technology plays in the residents’ education process — digital radiology and photography are a big part of the residents’ treatment planning and management experience.
“This is an exciting time to be a dentist, “ Starr said, “because there are so many new interdisciplinary developments in dental treatments that can now be regularly performed at a high level.”
Reaccreditation success for the Jacksonville Dental Clinic is the result of the hard work and group effort by the faculty, staff and students, but it was made a little more predictable by Starr’s own experience as a CODA site visitor.
“Not only have I seen the practices that work well at other clinics, but I also have the advantage of knowing what a site evaluator will be looking for,” Starr said. “Basically, it all comes down to people. If you’ve got the right people in place, attempting to do the right things, the outcomes are likely to be successful.”