Vision
Our vision for the RAK College of Dental Sciences is to be recognized as an academic leader in the regional academic community of oral health educators and researchers. This status will be achieved through:
- its academic programs and the highest standards of scholarship;
- its highest quality of patient service;
- its highly skilled and caring graduates;
- its significant contributions to the advancement and dissemination of innovative approach of its outreach programs to meet the needs of society.
Mission
The School of Dentistry shares the overall mission of the RAK Medical and Health Sciences University to generate, disseminate, and preserve knowledge, and to serve the community.
Primary mission of the College is to prepare students to be competent oral health care professionals. The service mission of the college is to improve the health and well-being of the people of the community and the region through oral health care delivery and outreach programs that are especially attentive to underserved populations. The College’s research mission is to contribute to the behavioral, biomedical, and clinical aspects of oral health in the region.
Goals and Program Outcomes The dental curriculum has been developed to provide learning opportunities enabling dental students to acquire fundamental knowledge develop basic skills and appreciate principles relevant to oral health care in the context of the community.
BDS graduates shall have opportunities to work in general practice, the community dental service, hospital practice, university teaching, research institutions, public health services, National Defense forces and dental hygiene product manufacturing companies.
The Five-year curriculum has been designed to achieve the following goals:
- To meet the oral health needs of the United Arab Emirates community by a blend of the dental science and craft of medicine with emphasis on maxillofacial disease prevention and oral-dental health promotion.
- To prepare dental practitioners for evidence based dental practice in the changing health care environment of the 21st Century.
- To acquire the basic medical and dental knowledge and skills that will allow the professional, ethical, and humane practice of dentistry.
- To demonstrate training in dental education at par with international standards of dental practice.
- To integrate basic sciences with oral health sciences to enable the students to apply their knowledge to oral health care.
- To integrate clinical knowledge with clinical skills to enable the students deliver efficient patient care.
- To develop a professional and compassionate approach to the analysis and management of health care.
- To promote acquisition of the skills, attitude and behavior that facilitates effective and appropriate interaction with patients and colleagues.
- To produce caring, knowledgeable, competent and skillful oral specialist who recognizes and accepts the obligation to practice in the best interest of the patient at all times.
Program Outcomes
Knowledge:
The Dental Students shall be able to:
- Describe the molecular basis of diseases and the way in which they affect the body, oral cavity and maxillofacial region.
- Recognize the scientific basis of general and oral diseases including the use of medicines in the management of common oral diseases.
- Demonstrate knowledge of the basic oral health, clinical skills and the ability to acquire, manage and use current information for clinical decision making and problem solving in the care of individual patients, family members, populations and systems of oral health and dental care delivery.
- Integrate basic sciences knowledge in the clinical context in order to solve the common medical and dental problems.
- Demonstrate the knowledge of basic scientific knowledge of dental biomaterials/ dental biomechanics and its application in dentistry.
- Describe basic bio-behavioral and clinical science knowledge used to analyze and solve dental problems related to the oral diagnosis, treatment and prevention of oral diseases.
- Recognize the implications of cultural, social, economic, legal, and historical contexts for oral patient care.
- Describe the implications of basic ethical principles, including confidentiality, informed consent, truth telling, and justice, for the oral health.
- Describe strategies to support life-long learning via both print and electronic sources to assist in making diagnostic and treatment decisions (e.g., practice guidelines) and to remain current with advances in medical and dental knowledge and practice (e.g., medical and dental information data bases).
- Demonstrate knowledge of the functional approach to managing chronic dental problems.
- Demonstrate the ability to apply basic dental sciences knowledge in interpretation, critical thinking and problem solving of common (community) dental problems.
- Demonstrate knowledge of the unique oro-dental health care needs of ethnically diverse populations and communities.
- Demonstrate the ability to acquire new information and data and to critically appraise its validity and applicability to one’s professional decisions, including the application of information systems technologies for support of clinical decision-making.
Skills:
The Students shall be able to :
- Demonstrate the ability to elicit accurate comprehensive and focused medical and dental histories by employing techniques that facilitate the patient’s sharing of information.
- Demonstrate the ability to conduct both effective and accurate comprehensive and focused physical examinations of head and neck and oral cavity in particular and know when each is most appropriate.
- Demonstrate the appropriate use of laboratory tests and different imaging studies in making diagnostic and treatment decisions.
- Demonstrate the ability to evaluate the patient’s medical and dental problems and to formulate accurate hypotheses to serve as the basis for making diagnostic and treatment decisions.
- Perform common dental techniques/ procedures while dealing with the patients with different dental problems relating to maxillofacial surgery, conservative, orthodontics, periodontics, prosthodontics, Pediatric Dentistry on patients in 3rd, 4th and 5th year and on mannequins in 1st and 2nd year.
- Demonstrate the ability to formulate and implement a plan of care for both the prevention and treatment of disease and the relief of symptoms and suffering
- Demonstrate the effective use of pharmocotherapeutic agents and other therapeutic modalities, while teaching patients the importance of preventive dentistry, oral health promotion, and wellness.
- Demonstrate an understanding of the principles and method of Practice-Based Learning and Improvement that involves investigation and evaluation of one’s own patient care, appraisal and assimilation of scientific evidence, and improvements in patient care.
Attitudes/Behaviors:
The Students shall be able to :
- Display the personal attributes of compassion, honesty, and integrity in relationship with patients, families, communities and the dental profession.
- Demonstrate the ability to communicate compassionately and effectively, both verbally and in writing, with patients, their families, colleagues and others with whom dental surgeons must exchange information in carrying out their responsibilities.
- Exhibit appropriate value for the sensitive nature of the dentist/patient relationship and the importance of compassionate communication and active listening, with attention to the patient’s familial, cultural, and spiritual circumstances.
- Demonstrate professionalism and high ethical standards in all aspects of dental practice, specifically competence, honesty, integrity, compassion, respect for others, professional responsibility and social responsibility.
- Exhibit a capacity for self-evaluation, moral reflection and ethical reasoning to form the basis for a self-directed, life long engagement in the responsible, committed, compassionate practice of medicine
- Demonstrate the ability to educate patients about their oral health problems and to motivate them to adopt oral and dental health promoting behaviors
- Demonstrate the ability to work effectively as part of an oral health care team, with appreciation for the multiple contributions of other health care professionals and agencies.
The Curriculum
The curriculum has been designed to provide an integrated, enquiry-based five year program incorporating problem-oriented learning (POL). A key feature of the program is integration between theory and practice through clinical skills training from the first year.
The program falls in with current advances in dentistry and provides an up-to-date teaching structure. There is integration of basic science knowledge with the clinical knowledge. However each course proceeds from simple to more complex information.
Pre-Clinical Program
The pre-clinical program in first and second years is in semester based and incorporates an interdisciplinary approach, with subjects including anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, oral biology and pharmacology. During this period, emphasis is placed on small-group teaching and self-learning.
Clinical Program
The clinical teaching at the College provides opportunities to students to gain extensive and varied clinical experience. Under supervision, clinical students will begin interacting and analyzing the patients findings, in the first clinical semester. As students progress, the clinical program covers courses such as Pediatric Dentistry, Restorative Dentistry, Dental Prosthetics, Oral Medicine, Oral Surgery, Oral Diagnosis, Oral Pathology, Orthodontics, Periodontology and Radiology. Students extend their pre clinical experience gained in the first two years in to the clinical practice program. Here, students take responsibility for their own patients’ treatment within the Dental Hospital. In this way students acquire the concepts of whole-patient care and teamwork.
In order to fulfill the curricular requirement of the BDS program, students get clinical training in General Medicine and Surgery in a general hospital. Students learn social and psychological side of patient care while developing their interpersonal and communication skills. Students also gain an appreciation of the factors involved in controlling dental disease, together with epidemiology and statistical techniques, and key ethical and medico-legal issues that surround the practice of dentistry.
Our practitioner attachment scheme ensures that students spend time with general dental practitioners. Visits to specialist dental units and the community dental service are also organized separately.
In the first year, the first semester is spent in learning general education courses. In the second semester the main emphasis is on biomedical/basic sciences / normal human structure and function.
In the second year, the focus shifts to the pathophysiology of diseases and methods used to diagnose and treat illness. Dental basic sciences courses will run along these as well.
The first and second years’ curricula have been arranged system wise. For the basic science subjects the student will simultaneously study head and neck anatomy, physiology, oral physiology, dental biochemistry associated with systems through POL. This will help the student to achieve horizontal integration in the knowledge of the normal structure and function of the human body in general and oral cavity in particular. Students will use of phantom-head laboratory and multi-purpose laboratories to acquire skills that would prepare them to treat patients during their clinical years.
Similarly, vertical integration of the second year courses with the first year courses will be achieved by following a system-based structuring of pathology, microbiology and pharmacology relevant to oral health sciences. Related dental knowledge and skills course will be taught side-by-side.
The next two and a half years of the academic program are set to meet specific needs of the students in order to cover topics and develop skills in clinical dentistry. The program involves theoretical and clinical components including rotations through the main clinical disciplines.
POL is used throughout the program. The method is interdisciplinary and there are no course boundaries. The dental students work in groups of 8-10 facilitated by a tutor to research topics and share information in a mutually supportive environment. Each week a different problem forms the focus of learning, development of communicative skills module, and teaches (verbal and non-verbal) communication skills. These skills include how to communicate with patients, to communicate with dental teams and ways to educate dental patients in preventive care using appropriate educational materials.
Novel aspects of this program include:
- Shared clinical and didactic teaching;
- Multidisciplinary clinics;
- Supervision by the faculty; and
- Rotations of students to out reach facilities.
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