DENTAL PUBLIC HEALTH

Catalog description

Integrated Behavioral Health Sciences. The dental public health part of the course defines public health, highlighting the role of the public health dentist, 10 Essential Public Health Services, and key public health agencies. Students explore healthcare systems, social determinants of health, and national oral health indicators to understand factors influencing oral health outcomes. The course emphasizes oral health disparities and barriers to care, preparing students to apply population-based approaches to promote equity and improve community oral health. Each student will be a part of a team tasked with creating a plan for a service-learning project. This will include identifying an oral healthcare disparity within the community, performing a literature review on the population and intervention, creating goals and objectives for a program to address the disparity, and then creating a plan for implementation of the project. The approved service- learning project will be implemented by the team over the course of the following year. The epidemiology part of the course introduces students to essential population health concepts, including disease distribution and determinants, surveillance, incidence, prevalence, and patterns of endemic, epidemic, and pandemic spread. Students learn to analyze disease trends, evaluate preventive interventions, apply evidence-based strategies, and understand immunity and latency. The course also emphasizes study design, use of the PICO framework, and ethical principles, preparing students to critically appraise research and apply epidemiologic principles to evidence- based clinical practice.