ADA Comment On AAPHD Dental Therapist Curriculum Development
Lawmakers, charitable organizations and other stakeholders-some of them with very little experience in or understanding of oral health care-are proposing various models for so-called “midlevel” dental providers, non-dentists who would perform surgical/irreversible procedures. To date there has been no consensus on the specific prerequisites, scope or duration of educational program, or other critical attributes needed to define any academic model. The American Association of Public Health Dentistry recently published a series of papers that seek to clarify that by describing a recommended curriculum for the training of dental therapists. While we appreciate the work that went into this, we disagree on a critical point: The ADA does not believe a non-dentist should perform surgical/irreversible procedures. The ADA supports innovations in the dental team that would improve oral health among people who lack adequate access to care, provided that those innovations do not compromise the very system they seek to extend. Our own Community Dental Health Coordinator pilot project seeks to do that by training community health workers who specialize in oral health education and disease prevention, factors that ultimately are the nation’s best hope of ending what we all agree are unacceptable levels of oral disease.
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