Seminar - 90 Minutes

The Next Wave of State-Level Dental Therapy Activity: Delivering on Implementation

Presenter(s)

• 

  Mary Williard, DDS

  Director of DHAT Training
  Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium
• 

  Donald Chi, DDS, PhD

  Associate Professor
  University of Washington School of Dentistry
• TA

  Toby Absher, MBA

  Director of Operations
  Willamette Dental Group

With laws passed in four states and significant tribal adoption, oral health stakeholders are going beyond authorization debates to deal with the next wave of activity concerning dental therapy: implementation. This entails helping training programs become CODA accredited, designing evaluations required by authorizing legislation, and working with employers – large and small – to hire these providers. This seminar offers insight into how states and tribes working through the nuts and bolts of building and deploying this growing provider type. Speakers from Alaska will discuss the experience of going through CODA accreditation, the lead author of the first outcomes study on U.S. dental therapists will discuss the most important questions that state or tribal-level evaluations should address, and an official Willamette Dental Group -- from the largest multi-specialty dental group in the Pacific Northwest -- will describe why, and how, Willamette Dental intends to use dental therapists in Oregon.

 

Learning Objectives:

• Better understand the experience of the first dental therapist training institution to apply for CODA accreditation.
• Understand broadly how to construct a useful large-scale dental therapy evaluation with information available to most state health agencies.
• Understand why a large dental practice is interested in hiring dental therapists and how they plan to use them.