Course overview
Population Health & Professional Practice IIOH (PHPP) builds on the PHPP year one curriculum which has been designed to enable the development of skills required to be a critical decision maker in the contemporary role of an Oral Health Therapist (OHT). Oral Health Therapists must make calculated decisions that relate to effective patient care, with community and population health outcomes in mind. Oral Health Therapists must be able to identify significant population oral health trends and developing a deep appreciate for the broader population drivers of those trends.
This course comprises of two content units: Social Context of Dentistry, which aims to increase students' awareness of the role of social context in shaping an individual's dental behaviours and the implications of this for clinical practice. And Evidence-Based Dentistry aims to equip students with the skills necessary to sustain and enhance the clinical practice of dentistry using scientific information published in biomedical journals. Topics include biostatistics and epidemiology.
Course learning outcomes
- Describe the potential pathways through which social determinants of health operate to shape oral health inequalities.
- Discuss how individual choices related to health behaviours are situated within economic, historical, family, cultural and political contexts.
- Explain how racism is conceptualised in the social determinants of health framework, and discuss strategies to practise antiracist clinical care and advocacy.
- Discuss the concept of the social gradient in oral health and explain why interventions focusing only on the most disadvantaged groups are unlikely to substantially reduce inequalities.
- Discuss how oral health promotion, workforce innovation and system-level reform can be integrated to address structural inequities in oral health.
- Critically discuss the hierarchy of evidence based on study designs.
- Have an understanding of the most important study designs in Dentistry, such as randomised-clinical trials, cohort studies, cross-sectional studies, case-control , ecological studies and systematic reviews.
- Describe key concepts in experimental studies such as randomization and exchangeability, and how they relate to systematic bias.
- Understand the sources of systematic bias and random error in epidemiological studies, according to assessment tools such as the Rob2.
- Provide interpretation of key statistical concepts in oral epidemiology, such as P-values and 95% confidence intervals.