From private practice to public policy

A dentist describes her journey from private practice to legislative assistant. Beginning with work in the ADA's Government Relations Office and then through the American Dental Association's Congressional Fellowship, Dr. Skoulas has now taken a full-time position monitoring and developing legislation for Congressman Edward J. Markey.     

From production to performance: solving the positioning dilemma in dental practice

BACKGROUND: Thriving dental practices are excellent at providing a warm personal experience or are efficient, fast and cost-effective. Those that that attempt to do both end up being mediocre at just about everything. CONCLUSIONS: Introducing ideas from dramaturgy and service simultaneity in the services marketing literature, the authors provide a model for the conceptualization and redesign of the dental practice. PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS: Successful dental practices will be those that concentrate on low customization of activities in the back office or high customization of activities in the front office.     

Evaluation of the filler packing structures in dental resin composites: From theory to practice

Objectives

The aim of this study is to evaluate the packing properties of uniform silica particles and their mixture with secondary particles yielding maximally loaded dental composites. We intend to verify the difference between the idealized models (the close-packed structures and the random-packed structures) and the actual experimental results, in order to provide guidance for the preparation of dental composites. The influence of secondary particle size and the resin composition on the physical–mechanical properties and the rheological properties of the experimental dental composites was also investigated.

From dental science to clinical practice: Knowledge translation and evidence-based dentistry principles

It has been claimed that in order to decrease the gap between what we know and what we do, research findings must be translated from knowledge to action. Such practices better enable dentists to make evidence-based decisions instead of personal ideas and judgments. To this end, this literature review aims to revisit the concepts of knowledge translation and evidence-based dentistry (EBD) and depict their role and influence within dental education. It addresses some possible strategies to facilitate knowledge translation (KT), encourage dental students to use EBD principles, and to encourage dental educators to create an environment in which students become self-directed learners. It concludes with a call to develop up-to-date and efficient online platforms that could grant dentists better access to EBD sources in order to more efficiently translate research evidence into the clinic.