The Department of Community & Preventive Dentistry of the Dow University of Health Sciences, Karachi, Pakistan is believed to have a very important role in imparting knowledge, skills and expertise pertinent to public oriented oral health care and services.
1. To meet the increasing need and demand for oral health care of the disadvantaged population and the child population to provide these indiv
iduals with not only oral health education and prevention but also restoration of dental caries through Atraumatic Restorative Treatment procedure. ART is the basic dental care that we can provide for the restoration of Dental Caries which is an irreversible disease of hard dental tissue. This procedure is considered as an essential component of the Basic Package of Oral Care. Moreover, we have recently started a project titled “School Based Oral Health Services” where school children are rendered with essential oral care through Basic Package of Oral Care (BPOC). Not only our undergraduate dental (BDS) and postgraduate (MDS) students are involved in rendering these services but also our Dental Hygiene students (also known as Dental Care Professionals) are important part of our community dentistry team.
2. To expand the role of oral health care professionals we are playing a leading role in the country patient education and disease prevention, and guiding and supervising general health and oral health care teams through active participation in efforts to improve patients' overall health. One such example is our utility of dental undergraduate workforce (both BDS and BS Dental Hygiene students) and utilization of lady health workers and visitors to deliver oral health care messages to communities.
3. For shaping a responsive educational model, it is believed that the current traditional model of dental education does not have the ability to address adequately disparities in oral health. To better equip members of the oral healthcare workforce team for the challenges ahead the department has revised its educational curricula of Community Dentistry that focus on the current dental advancements. The departmental educational activities is focusing not only on a more stronger focus on public health and epidemiology, but also placing more emphasis on critical thinking, team management and inter professional education by incorporating problem based learning, evidence based learning, community based learning and research based learning techniques all at the same time. We have introduced PICO worksheets which help our students to formulate research questions and evidence search accordingly. And finally we have evaluation and appraisal forms for each student who is evaluated for all areas of competences earlier explained.
4.` To mitigate the impacts of socio-economic dynamics and ensuring sustainability of oral healthcare delivery through economic ups and downs, we have taken a lead role in Pakistan to take responsibilities of advocating for Oral Health in All Policies.
5. Fostering fundamental and translational research and technology. Such examples include our going researches and community trials on the proactive uses of the available dental hygiene devices and materials such as plaque removing efficacy of old toothbrushes and identification of effective level of fluorides in toothpastes; and innovative use of available and affordable dental techniques for diagnosis, prevention and restoration of dental diseases where for diagnosis we have come up with new dental disease measuring indices and utilization of single less expensive dental material as both preventive and restorative purpose.
