New opportunities and new beginnings | A Message from the Dean

Happy New Year! Last year was wonderful for the School of Dentistry, including: 

  • MDRCBB celebrated its 30-year anniversary with a global symposium;
  • we produced 100+ publications
  • approximately 90,000 patients received care from our providers
  • Give Kids a Smile and other community engagement events took place
  • we shared ice cream in the courtyard
  • students and residents graduated, and new students and residents joined us
  • we have new faculty and staff

And so much more! Whew!

This year provides us with a fresh opportunity to continue doing exciting things. One of my priorities for this year is for us to do more to improve our patients’ experiences. One of these patient groups is those cared for at our West Bank GPR clinic. Many of these patients have special needs, and some must be treated in an operating room. A team of faculty have been developing a plan to provide continuity of care for these patients after the clinic closure at the end of June of this year. I am thankful to Drs. Steve Shuman, Jeff Stefani, Mary Owens, and Mark Roettger for developing a new Special Care and Hospital Fellowship program.

This program will allow us to serve patients with special health care needs, including those with medical, neurodevelopmental, cognitive, psychological, behavioral, and physical challenges that require more specialized care than found in conventional dental care settings and require alternative approaches, including: hospital consultation service, emergency department and operating rooms. We will be renovating a small number of operatories on the sixth floor of Moos Tower to care for these patients. There is still work to do to make this happen, but it is a new beginning for us, and is fitting to share this as we say goodbye to 2022, and usher in 2023, with new opportunities and the beginning of new directions.







 

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