Department of Comprehensive Care
The Department of Comprehensive Care’s mission is to educate our pre-doctoral dental students with evidence-based principles, current technology and the foundational knowledge to empower them to provide optimal patient oral health, comfort, function, and esthetics through risk-based diagnosis, prevention, tooth-preserving management of caries and non-carious infectious and inflammatory diseases, and disorders of the oral cavity, considering the patient's overall health in an integrated clinical environment.
To achieve this goal, the department has been organized into divisions each providing the building blocks required to transform the student into a true dental professional capable of delivering high-quality, ethical, and caring dentistry. In addition, we try to foster the civic community engagement and leadership skills that will be the foundation of our students’ careers.
The Divisions of the Department of Comprehensive Care are: Prosthodontics, Restorative Dentistry, Endodontics, Periodontics, Oral Diagnosis and Radiology and Community Outreach.
The department maintains the School’s Simulation Clinic for preclinical education and the Comprehensive Care Modules (CCM) for the clinical care of adult patients, both of which contribute to the transition from didactic through preclinical to clinical studies and patient care.
The department is responsible for the predoctoral education of fixed-, removable-and implant prosthodontics, occlusion, biomaterials, operative dentistry, endodontics, periodontics, oral diagnosis, and radiology.
During their clinical education, students learn to practice evidence-based dentistry by evaluating the literature, critically appraising new medical and dental knowledge, and therapies, and applying that information to provide the best oral health care for their patients. Dental students have an opportunity to have early clinical experiences by providing preventative and periodontal treatment in their 2nd years of dental school. In their 3rd and 4th years of dental school, students participate in a clinical competency-based program in which they treat patients in our comprehensive care modules. They also treat patients while on clinical rotations to specialty clinics and they go to community based clinical facilities.