Teaching innovations at McGill prepare students for real-world clinical setting.

In the preclinical labs of McGill’s faculty of dentistry, the tried-and-true is fused with the innovative, as dental manikins share space with work stations augmented by plasma screens and keypads. The high-tech equipment serves an important purpose, helping students acquire skills during the condensed preclinical session. This portion of the DMD program lasts for just under 6 months in the final half of the second year, before students enter their final 2 years of clinical training. The plasma screens, an initiative of prosthodontics instructor Dr. Samer Abi-Nader, allow professors to demonstrate procedures for all students to observe — not just a few sitting near the front of the lab. These procedures can then be displayed continuously as the students practise the techniques. The keypads make it easy for a professor to ask multiplechoice questions and receive real-time responses, providing an immediate snapshot of the students’ comprehension of the material. Thus, professors know when they are free to move ahead and when they must linger over more confusing parts of the curriculum. “As professors, we must always aim to be efficient because we have a very short preclinical session in which to train our students on the skills they need,” explains Dr. Marie Dagenais, associate dean (academic). The time squeeze is partly a result of dentistry students spending the first 18 months of the DMD program studying alongside their peers in the faculty of medicine in McGill’s “Basis of Medicine and Dentistry” biomedical science program. “We want our students to have a very good medical background so they can understand complex health problems and interact well with their colleagues,” says Dr. Dagenais. “Interdisciplinary training is important because, to provide good patient care, people across the health care system have to collaborate. The dentist has a role in the global health of the patient and needs to develop rich professional relationships with medical colleagues, physical therapists, nurses and other professionals,” she says.