Accreditation standards are the criteria against which dentistry education and training programmes will be assessed for accreditation purposes. These standards are also periodically reviewed. The standards are made available to ACODE Provider prior to the accreditation process.
Accreditation is both a status and a process.
As a status: Accreditation provides the public a standard caliber that the Continuing Oral & Dental Education Programme meets standards of quality set forth by ACODE’s Governing board.
As a process: Accreditation demonstrates the ability to meet predetermined criteria and standards of accreditation. This reflects that CODE Programme is committed to self-study and external review by one's peers, and is continuously seeking ways to enhance the quality of education and training provided.
ACODE also collaborates with industry experts to create standards. Dental professionals are thus assured that they will receive education which is a balance between high academic quality and professional relevance.
The benefits of accredited CODE Programme includes:
Dental professionals can access programme details, subject choices and a vast speaker-base at a click of a button which makes the programme easily accessible. This ensures that learning is a lifelong endeavor and helps stay updated with today's legal requirements, technology, practice tools and other areas critical to the practice of dentistry
The assessment of quality is the foundation for the standards. In addition to the emphasis on quality education, the Accreditation Standards for Continuing Oral & Dental Education Programmes are designed to meet the following goals:
The following steps comprise an assessment process designed to measure quality and effectiveness of the educational programmes. The assessment process includes:
Implementation of this process will also enhance the credibility and accountability of educational programmes.
It is anticipated that the accreditation standards for Continuing Oral & Dental Education (CODE) programmes will strengthen the teaching, patient care and research. The foundation of these standards is a competency-based model of education. Competency is a complex set of capacities including knowledge, experience, critical thinking, problem- solving, professionalism, personal integrity and procedural skills that are necessary to begin the independent and unsupervised practice of general dentistry and delivery of patient care.
Professional competence is the habitual and judicious use of communication, knowledge, critical appraisal, clinical reasoning, emotions, values and reflection in daily practice for the benefit of the individuals and communities served.
Among the factors that influence CODE curriculum are standard and includes emerging scientific evidence, new research focus, approaches to clinical education, and pedagogical philosophies and practices. In addition, the demographics of our society are changing and the educational environment must reflect those changes.
People are living longer with more complex health issues, and the dental profession is expected to provide care for these individuals. Diversity of curriculum is a strength of dental education, the core principles below promote an environment conducive to change, innovation, and continuous improvement in educational programmes. Application of these principles throughout the Continuing Oral & Dental Education programme is essential in achieving quality.
The standards reconfirm and emphasize the importance for comprehensive patient care and encourage patient-centered approaches in teaching and oral health care delivery. Administration, faculty, staff and dental professionals are expected to develop and implement definitions, practices, operations and evaluation methods so that patient-centered comprehensive care is the norm.
This implies the following characteristics or practices:
Critical thinking is underpinning to teaching and deep learning in any subject. The components of critical thinking are:
In professional practice, critical thinking enables the dentist to recognize pertinent information, make appropriate decisions based on a deliberate and open-minded review of the available options, evaluate outcomes of diagnostic and therapeutic decisions, and assess his or her own performance.
Accordingly, the Continuing Oral & Dental Educational programme must develop Dental professionals who are able to:
The explosion of scientific knowledge makes it impossible for Dental professionals to comprehend and retain all the information necessary for a lifetime of practice. Faculty must serve as role models demonstrating that they understand and value scientific discovery and life-long learning in their daily interactions with dental professionals, patients and colleagues.
Educational programmes must enable and support the dental professionals’ evolution as independent learners actively engaged in their curricula using strategies that foster integrated approaches to learning. Curricula must be contemporary, appropriately complex and must encourage Dental professionals to take responsibility for their learning by helping them learn how to learn.
Learning must occur in the context of real oral health care problems rather than within singular content-specific disciplines. Learning objectives that cut across traditional disciplines and correlate with the expected competencies enhance curriculum design. Beyond the acquisition of scientific knowledge, the capacity to think scientifically and apply the scientific method is critical if Dental professionals are to analyze and solve Oral health problems, understand research, and practice evidence-based dentistry.
Evidence-based dentistry (EBD) is an approach that requires the judicious integration of systematic assessments of clinically relevant scientific evidence, relating to the patient's oral and medical condition and history, with the dentist's clinical expertise and the patient's treatment needs and preferences.
EBD uses thorough, unbiased systematic reviews and critical appraisal of the best available scientific evidence in combination with clinical and patient factors to make informed decisions about appropriate health care for specific clinical circumstances.
Curriculum content and learning experiences must incorporate the principles of evidence-based inquiry, and involve faculty who practice EBD and model critical appraisal for dental professionals during the process of patient care.
Dental education programmes must conduct regular assessments of Dental professionals’ learning throughout their education. Such assessment not only focuses on whether they have achieved the competencies necessary to advance professionally (summative assessment), but also assists learners in developing the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values considered important at their stage of learning (formative assessment).
Self-assessment is indicative of the extent to which dental professionals take responsibility for their own learning. To improve curricula, assessment involves a dialogue between and among faculty, dental professionals, and administrators that is grounded in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Data from programme outcomes, assessment of dental professionals learning, and feedback from them and faculty can be used in a process that actively engages both Dental professionals and faculty.
Technology enables Continuing Oral & Dental Education programmes to improve patient care, and to revolutionize all aspects of the curriculum, from didactic courses to clinical instruction. Contemporary dental education programmes regularly assess their use of technology and explore new applications of technological advances to enhance dental professionals learning and to assist faculty as facilitators of learning and designers of learning environments. Use of technology must include systems and processes to safeguard the quality of patient care and ensures the integrity of dental professional’s performance.
Technology has the potential to reduce expenses for teaching and learning and helps to alleviate increasing demands on faculty and dental professional’s time. Use of technology in Oral & Dental Education programmes can support learning in different ways, including self-directed, distance and asynchronous learning.
Faculty development is a necessary condition for change and innovation in Continuing Oral & Dental Education. The environment of higher education is changing dramatically, and with it health professionals education. Dental education programmes can re-examine the relationship between what faculty does and how Dental professionals learn from the authority who impart information.
On-going faculty development is a requirement to improve teaching and learning, to foster curriculum change, to enhance retention and job satisfaction of faculty, and to maintain the vitality of academic dentistry as the wellspring of a learned profession.
Access to health care and changing demographics are driving a new vision of Oral health care workforce. Dental curricula can change to develop an evolutionary dentist, providing opportunities early in their educational experiences to engage other health care professionals. Enhancing the public’s access to Oral health care and the connection of Oral health to general health form a nexus that links Oral health care providers to colleagues in other health professions.
Health care professionals educated to deliver patient-centered care as members of an inter-disciplinary team present a challenge for educational programmes. Patient care by all team members will emphasize evidence-based practice, quality improvement approaches, the application of technology and emerging information, and outcomes assessment.
Dental Education Programmes seek and take advantage of opportunities to educate dental professionals who will assume new roles in safeguarding, promoting, and caring for the oral health care needs of the public.
Diversity in education is essential to academic excellence. A significant amount of learning occurs through informal interactions among individuals who are of different races, ethnicity, religions, and backgrounds; come from cities, rural areas and from various geographic regions; and have a wide variety of interests, talents and perspectives.
These interactions allow Dental professionals to directly and indirectly learn from their differences, and to stimulate one another to re-examine even their most deeply held assumptions about themselves and their world. Educational programmes create an environment that ensures an in-depth exchange of ideas and beliefs across gender, racial, ethnic, cultural and socio-economic lines.
These principles create an environmental framework intended to foster educational quality and innovation in ways that are unique to the mission, strengths and resources.
ACODE Governing board believes that implementation of this guidance will ensure that Dental education programmes develop professionals who have the capacity for life-long and self-directed learning and are capable of providing evidence-based care to meet the needs their patients and of society.