CATEGORY 16 AUSTRALASIAN DENTIST Repetition, supervision, and the limits of the weekend course INNOVATIONS FOR SALE For more details contact us today www.practicesales.com.au | 1800 375 227 Established Four-Surgery Dental Practice in the Heart of Robina One Australian training program has spent more than a decade on a straightforward premise: that general dentists learn complex procedures the way they learned everything else — by doing them, under supervision, on real patients. When Dr Yohan Thomas, a specialist prosthodontist based in Adelaide, founded the Advanced Dentistry Institute (ADI) in 2013, he had already spent more than a decade mentoring dental students. The observation that prompted it was a simple one. General dentists were graduating with the knowledge their examinations required, but not the repeated, supervised experience that turns knowledge into something a clinician will confidently attempt on a patient of their own. His response was deliberately unusual. Rather than run lecture days or modelbased workshops, the Advanced Dentistry Institute takes small groups of general dentists to a university clinic in India and pairs each one with their own specialist mentor. Over five days, candidates diagnose, plan and carry out procedures on live patients who are screened medically and dentally by the university beforehand, with a specialist beside them for every case. The programs are defined by what a dentist does rather than what they are shown. On the beginner implant course for instance, candidates place between 10 and 12 implants of their own across the week, working through diagnosis, treatment planning, placement, suturing and review rather than observing a demonstrator. Every cohort is kept deliberately small, and the great majority of each course is handson; the lectures exist to support the clinical work, not to stand in for it. The same model runs across the institute's programs, from beginner and advanced implant placement through to full-arch All-on-X rehabilitation, surgical extractions and rotary endodontics. Each course is led by a specialist in the relevant discipline, an oral surgeon for extractions, an endodontist for rotary endodontics, rather than a single generalist presenter. The small groups are the point rather than a limitation. One mentor working with one dentist can adjust to that person's pace and particular gaps in a way a larger format cannot. It is a demanding way to teach, and an expensive one to run, which is part of why few programs attempt it. “We don’t want you to just know the technique,” Dr Thomas has said of the thinking behind the model. “We want you to own it.” The institute is also unusually direct about what its courses will and will not do. Its own material tells prospective candidates that a five-day surgical extraction course “won’t turn you into an oral surgeon” but will meaningfully change the range of cases they are prepared to take on. That kind of qualification is rare in continuing-education marketing, and it sits alongside a consistent emphasis on recognising one's limits and knowing when to refer. There is another dimension to the arrangement that the institute tends not to lead with. The patients treated during each course come from a population that would often otherwise go without this kind of treatment, and their ongoing care, including restoration of the implants some months later, is managed by the university's postgraduate students once the visiting dentists have left. That the training does some good beyond the candidates themselves is, for Dr Thomas, part of the appeal, though he is careful not to overstate it. The support does not end when candidates fly home, either. Optional monthly mentorship sessions continue after the course, cases are reviewed remotely, and Dr Thomas makes inpractice visits for dentists who want guidance through their first placements in their own surgery. The stated intention is that the week abroad begins a dentist's development in a procedure rather than concluding it. Thirteen years on, more than 400 dentists have come through the institute's courses. The model has changed little across that time, which its founder attributes to the fact that the premise behind it has not needed revising: that the surest way for a dentist to become confident with a procedure is to have performed it, more than once, with an experienced clinician watching. Whether that warrants a university clinic on the other side of the world is a fair question for any dentist to weigh. What the Advanced Dentistry Institute offers is a considered answer to it, one built around the patient in the chair. u
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