Dental School 'Imprints' Students With Skills For Community Service

Main Category: Dentistry
Article Date: 22 May 2009 - 2:00 PDT

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More than ever, pediatric dental students at the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) are working in communities, with special emphasis on serving the underserved.

For more than a decade, the Dental School at UMB, in collaboration with state and national dental associations, has sent its hygiene and dental students out to low-income, inner-city and rural areas where children have limited access to dental care.

This year the School expanded its outreach to six weeks of each student's dental education. Dozens of projects are scheduled each year all over the state.

[For video 'Pediatric Student Outreach at National Dental Museum,' go to YouTube's UMBchannel]

"We want to imprint in our students that, not that only are they practitioners, but they are part of a community that needs the care of professionals," says Norman Tinanoff, DDS, MS, program director of the School's Department of Pediatric Dentistry. "We emphasize that in all four years," he adds.

Tinanoff says that the students are taught that dentistry is more than a technical surgical specialty. Rather, their education is aimed at experiencing service to the community "in different social environments, especially what they don't see at the Dental School," he says.

There are many citizens of Maryland who can't get access to care. The pediatric student outreach projects include providing dental care to migrant worker's children on Maryland's Eastern Shore, recent immigrants and their children who may not have citizenship and may not have access to state and federal programs, the Langley Park Latino community in central Maryland, the Esperanza Center in Baltimore, and rural communities in far northern Maryland and the Eastern Shore.

The School, which is part of the University of Maryland, Baltimore, collaborates in outreach with the Maryland State Dental Association, Maryland Academy of Pediatric Dentistry, Hispanic Dental Association, National Dental Association, and others.

Source: University of Maryland Baltimore