专业描述

The Department of Community Dentistry is the link between the School of Dental Medicine, the greater Cleveland community and beyond. The mission of the Department of Community Dentistry is to reduce disparities in oral health care for minorities and the underserved. We provide high quality oral health education, examinations, preventive services (dental sealants) and referrals for children in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD) while exposing dental students to the needs of underserved children and the communities in which they live. The Department of Community Dentistry has several programs which involve health services, education and research and are a resource for graduate students studying dental care systems. These programs have as their goal the protection and improvement of the oral health of individual patients and of the community at large. Faculty members of the department have research programs of their own and teach and serve on committees of graduate students from various departments of the University (Community Health Nursing, Epidemiology and Nutrition). The department has organized a research network of 255 general dentists in northern Ohio as a laboratory for health services research in dentistry. This network includes 45 African-American dentists, gender distribution that slightly oversamples female dentists, urban, suburban, and rural dentists and an age distribution similar to that described in national samples. Dentists drawn from the network have participated in two pilot direct observation studies, two studies of attitudes towards tobacco cessation programs in dental practice, and a study of computer usage in dental practice. A four-year NIH grant ($2.3 million) supported a major direct observation study of prevention in dental practice that will involve 120 network practices and over 6000 patient visits.