Background Errors are commonplace in dentistry, it is therefore our imperative as dental professionals to intercept them before they lead to an adverse event, and/or mitigate their effects when an adverse event occurs. This requires a systematic approach at both the profession-level, encapsulated in the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s Patient Safety Initiative structure, as well as at the practice-level, where Crew Resource Management is a tested paradigm. Supporting patient safety at both the dental practice and profession levels relies on understanding the types and causes of errors, an area in which little is known. Methods A retrospective review of dental adverse events reported in the literature was performed. Electronic bibliographic databases were searched and data were extracted on background characteristics, incident description, case characteristics, clinic setting where adverse event originated, phase of patient care that adverse event was detected, proximal cause, type of patient harm, degree of harm and recovery actions. Results 182 publications (containing 270 cases) were identified through our search. Delayed and unnecessary treatment/disease progression after misdiagnosis was the largest type of harm reported. 24.4% of reviewed cases were reported to have experienced permanent harm. One of every ten case reports reviewed (11.1%) reported that the adverse event resulted in the death of the affected patient. Conclusions Published case reports provide a window into understanding the nature and extent of dental adverse events, but for as much as the findings revealed about adverse events, they also identified the need for more broad-based contributions to our collective body of knowledge about adverse events in the dental office and their causes. Practical Implications Siloed and incomplete contributions to our understanding of adverse events in the dental office are threats to dental patients’ safety.

T rends in health professions education are often inluenced by reports that analyze national health care workforce needs, practice patterns of the various professions, and data on the quality of care provided, the cost-effectiveness of care, and the access to care. Over the past decade, the health professions have been urged to improve collaboration among their practitioners with the objective of improving the quality of care they provide, especially the complex care needed for an aging population and patients with chronic diseases.A body of knowledge has developed in the literature concerning what is now referred to as interprofessional education (IPE) and practice-a Association ReportAbstract: The state of interprofessional education (IPE) in U.S. and Canadian dental schools was studied by the American Dental Education Association (ADEA) Team Study Group on Interprofessional Education. The study group reviewed the pertinent IPE literature, examined IPE competencies for dental students, surveyed U.S. and Canadian dental schools to determine the current and planned status of IPE activities, and identiied best practices. Members of the study group prepared case studies of the exemplary IPE programs of six dental schools, based on information provided by those schools; representatives from each school then reviewed and approved its case study. Six reviewers critiqued a draft of the study group's report, and study group members and reviewers met together to prepare recommendations for schools. This report identiies four domains of competence for student achievement in IPE and summarizes responses to the survey (which had an 86 percent response rate). It also includes the case descriptions of six schools' IPE programs and the study group's recommendations for dental schools. The report concludes that there is general recognition of the goals of IPE across U.S. and Canadian dental schools, but a wide range of progress in IPE on the various campuses. Challenges to the further development of IPE are discussed.

Curriculum evaluations by recent graduates of the Harvard

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This study aims to investigate burnout and study engagement among medical students at Sun Yat-sen University, China.A cross-sectional survey was conducted among undergraduate medical students of Sun Yat-sen University, China. A total of 453 undergraduate students completed a self-administered, structured questionnaire between January and February, 2016. Burnout and study engagement were measured using the Maslach Burnout Inventory-Student Survey (MBI-SS) and the UTRECHT Work Engagement Scale-Students (UWES-S), respectively. Subjects who scored high in emotional exhaustion subscale, high in cynicism subscale, and low in professional efficacy subscale simultaneously were graded as having high risk of burnout. Independent sample t tests and chi-square tests were used to compare the differences in burnout and work engagement between genders, majors, and grade levels.The means (standard deviations) of the MBI-SS subscales were 3.42 (1.45) for emotional exhaustion, 2.34 (1.64) for cynicism, and 3.04 (1.30) for professional efficacy. The means (standard deviations) of the UWES-S subscales were 3.13 (1.49) for vigor, 3.44 (1.47) for dedication and 3.00 (1.51) for absorption. Approximately 1 in 11 students experienced a high risk of burnout. There were no statistically significant gender differences in burnout and study engagement. There were also no statistically significant differences in burnout and study engagement subscales according to student major. Students in higher grades displayed increased burnout risk, higher mean burnout subscale score of cynicism, lower mean burnout subscale score of professional efficacy, and decreased mean study engagement subscale scores of dedication and absorption. There were strong correlations within study engagement subscales.Chinese medical students in this university experience a high level of burnout. Students at higher-grade level experience more burnout and decreased study engagement compared with students in lower level.

There is no commonly accepted standardized terminology for oral diagnoses. The purpose of this article is to report the development of a standardized dental diagnostic terminology by a work group of dental faculty members. The work group developed guiding principles for decision making and adhered to principles of terminology development. The members used an iterative process to develop a terminology incorporating concepts represented in the Toronto/University of California, San Francisco/Creighton University and International Classification of Diseases (ICD)‐9/10 codes and periodontal and endodontic diagnoses. Domain experts were consulted to develop a final list of diagnostic terms. A structure was developed, consisting of thirteen categories, seventy‐eight subcategories, and 1,158 diagnostic terms, hierarchically organized and mappable to other terminologies and ontologies. Use of this standardized diagnostic terminology will reinforce the diagnosis‐treatment link and will facilitate clinical research, quality assurance, and patient communication. Future work will focus on implementation and approaches to enhance the validity and reliability of diagnostic term utilization.

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Few oral health databases are available for research and the advancement of evidence-based dentistry. In this work we developed a centralized data repository derived from electronic health records (EHRs) at four dental schools participating in the Consortium of Oral Health Research and Informatics. A multi-stakeholder committee developed a data governance framework that encouraged data sharing while allowing control of contributed data. We adopted the i2b2 data warehousing platform and mapped data from each institution to a common reference terminology. We realized that dental EHRs urgently need to adopt common terminologies. While all used the same treatment code set, only three of the four sites used a common diagnostic terminology, and there were wide discrepancies in how medical and dental histories were documented. BigMouth was successfully launched in August 2012 with data on 1.1 million patients, and made available to users at the contributing institutions.