 As
we begin September 2003 at the USC School of Dentistry, we
welcome the new dental hygiene and dental classes, the
advanced standing international doctors, the new dental
specialty residents (Advanced Education in General Dentistry,
Endodontics, General Practice Residency, Oral and
Maxillofacial Surgery, Orthodontics, Pediatric Dentistry,
Periodontics and Prosthodontics), and the graduate students in
Craniofacial Biology. And, we celebrate our entire USC School
of Dentistry full-time student population of more than 800
learners and 800 faculty and staff (i.e., full-time and
part-time faculty, and full-time staff). Along with our more
than 8,000 alumni and friends, and the more than 32,000
patients we treat or evaluate each year, we comprise the
extraordinary USC Dental Community. Welcome to a new trimester
of education, research, patient care and service as we
celebrate 106 years of shaping and influencing what is
thought, what is taught and what is practiced in the oral
health professions around the world.
We have come a long way from
the modest building in downtown Los Angeles where the USC
dental program began in 1897 with eleven students. In
September 2003, we are physically located on the University
Park Campus in the Norris Dental Science Center and on the
Health Sciences Campus in the Center for Craniofacial
Molecular Biology and the Los Angeles County + USC Medical
Center. Further, through service learning, we learn and
provide patient care at multiple venues throughout Southern
California. For example, we provide children with
comprehensive patient care at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles,
Long Beach Memorial Hospital, Children’s Dental Center in
Inglewood, USC Clinic at the Union Rescue Mission, QueensCare/USC
Mobile Dental Clinic at numerous elementary school sites of
Los Angeles Unified School District, and with our traditional
mobile clinic program at 14 different sites—from Bakersfield
to the California-Mexico border. In addition, we recently
initiated a cooperative agreement with Children’s Hospital
San Diego. Internationally, our students and faculty spent
their spring break providing oral health care for children in
Belize and Mexico over the last few years.
As you might surmise, a major
opportunity for USC is to provide comprehensive oral health to
children and their caregivers in order to reduce severe oral
health disparities in Southern California where more than 25
percent of children (birth through 15 years of age) live in
extreme poverty, well below the federal poverty level. The
opportunity is to be able to provide numerous and complex
clinical learning experiences for our students and residents
while reducing oral health disparities in the underserved
populations. The number one chronic disease of children is
dental caries, which is eight times more common than asthma.
Oral-facial pain and infection related to severe dental caries
in children is the number one reason for students missing
school and estimated nationally at 52 million hours each year
according to the evidence provided in the Surgeon General’s
Report Oral Health in America published in June 2000 and
readily available on the Internet. However, a major challenge
for each of us within the USC dental community is to
enthusiastically accept the requirement for calibration of
students, residents, faculty and staff so that the standard of
patient care in any of these multiple USC clinical venues
always reflects quality and comprehensive oral health care for
all patients.
One approach for USC to
actually realize quality assurance and quality controls at all
clinical venues is to introduce the Office of Quality
Assurance and to engage more clinic faculty to rotate through
these various venues and to thereby improve the cooperation
and coordination of quality education, research, patient care
and service throughout the USC clinic experiential learning
environs. We have initiated the planning for this process and
will soon provide a detailed description of how this strategy
can and will be applied at USC. The anticipated goal is to
seed and nurture a USC school-wide positive attitude that
translates into “how are we doing, and how can we do it
better” throughout our learning community. Our objective is
to assure that clinical competencies are learned and ideally
practiced throughout all of the USC clinical learning venues.
This is particularly important
when considering diagnosis, treatment planning, treatments and
evaluation of oral health care outcomes. Here our shared goal
is to utilize available information technology to measure and
document learning coupled with patient care. For example,
accurate diagnosis is the cornerstone of oral health care! To
plan a successful treatment for a patient, a doctor (student,
resident, faculty) must first determine the nature of the
disease, disorder or illness. In most branches of the oral
health professions, doctors (students, residents and faculty)
can base their diagnosis on objective tests: various types of
imaging to visualize a broken tooth, patterns of dental caries
penetration through enamel and dentin, a periapical abscess,
bone loss around teeth, periodontal pocket depth, a tumor, for
example; or perform a surgical biopsy to obtain tissues for
histopathology to identify putative malignant cells. Fluid
samples can be obtained from saliva or crevicular fluids to
identify and quantitate microbial infections and/or levels of
biomarkers (molecules) that can be informative for the
progression of viral, bacterial or yeast infections. These and
many other objective diagnostic sources of information can be
used to advance evidence-based dentistry.
This diagnostic data can also
be integrated into our new school-wide databases to better
define, document, measure, compare and evaluate many qualities
of our oral health care educational programs. The activation
of axiUm will take place this month following the six months
of beta testing that has been completed within our USC
intramural faculty group practice located in the University
Village. The new USC axiUm patient management information
technology system will enable a new era of objective and
quality patient care at the USC “Centers of Oral Health
Care.” Yes, we must anticipate an era of change and
adjustments, frustrations and delays, yet eventually all of
our clinic programs will be enabled with a new set of tools to
complement the USC tradition of clinical excellence. Your
flexibility and cooperation are being called upon to make
these technological transitions effective as well as
comfortable. Information technology training programs for
students, residents, faculty and staff are in progress. Our
USC learning organization is discovering new ways to better
manage patient care.
I’m excited (and I hope you
are) as we begin my fourth year as the 11th dean of the USC
School of Dentistry. With your continued support, we are
advancing the depth and breadth of our numerous academic
programs in the wonderful School of Dentistry. I take pride in
our shared past, and I anticipate continued celebrations for
our future.
I wish all of us, each and
every one of us, a most successful 2003-2004 academic year. By
success I mean the courage and confidence to take on
challenging problems. By success I mean having the passion,
courage and persistence to continue through difficulties. I
mean the talent and tenacity to complete what we begin. I mean
being successful at our choices, the roads we choose, the
meetings we make, the mountains we move, and always, the
example we set. For me all of these features characterize
success. And as we periodically evaluate our journey, our
progress, our success, we not only celebrate what we have
accomplished, but who we are and how we made true progress.
|
