Implant Dentistry University Education

Chairs

The Chairs of the Implant Dentistry Special Interest Group are Mark Antal, Nikos Mattheos, Anders Nattestad and Christoph Ramseier.

Aims and Objectives

This Special Interest Group is focused on discussing the implementation of Implant Dentistry in the Undergraduate and Post graduate university curricula, as well as within the Continuing Professional Development arena.

Meeting and Activities: Vilnius 2017

Dentistry, and indeed implant dentistry is heading to a new era. Digital diagnostics as well as three-dimensional treatment planning are now becoming a daily routine. Moreover these guided surgery are now becoming available for all practitioners, for all over the world.

The innovations clearly make implant dentistry more precise and predictable, but with all these innovations, the basic procedures become much more different. Today, with a good CBCT, a reliable software and a precise surgical guide, a single implant placement can become less invasive than a simple dental extraction. Also, a dentist performing a guided implant surgery needs several different skills, than those that were needed in the past when flap surgeries, suturing, and manual skills were much more important.

Today, a young practitioner, who wants to perform a dental implant placement may be able to do this without elevating a flap, without suturing and just being able to handle CBCT and planning software. Although this might be a good step forward in precision and all other advantages known by the new techniques, what happens, when something goes wrong, and either the plan is not working, or the guide is not fitting. Several complications can happen from fracture of the guide, including bleeding or bone fractures.

1. Will the dental implantologist of the future, who is performing implant placement since the beginning of his/her career only with a surgical guide, be able to solve these cases?
2. Will it be possible for these new professionals to do a treatment planning, or just re-plan the treatment when they only have a panoramic x-ray, or when because of  an unexpected event, the whole surgical procedure has to changed?
3. How much shall be included in the graduate and postgraduate education of the new innovations, or teaching shall mainly focus on the traditional methods and techniques?
4. Will both, traditional and digital methods fill in a curriculum, or the CBCT planning will cause excluding panoramic planning in the future?

During this year’s Special Interest Group we are planning to discuss the current situation and trying to conclude on a common future plan, what is still essential to teach, and what is not that needed any more.

Meetings and Activities: Riga 2014

The Riga SIG meeting provided opportunity to review the work of the SIG thus far and in partcular the outcomes from the 2nd European Consensus Workshop in Implant Dentistry University Education, held in Budapest during June 2013.  Full details of this were published in a special edition of the European Journal of Dental Education Volume 18, Issue Supplement s1, March 2014. 

The Riga meeting also faciliated detailed group discussion in three core areas:

Group 1: Undergraduate Education

1. Barriers faced with the implementation of implant dentistry
2. Methods for sharing own curricula models

Group 2: Postgraduate Education

1. Implementing a new discipline into comprehensive dental care
2. Assurance of competent dental care within a specialty training

Group 3: Continuing Professional Development (CPD)

1. Educating the educators
2. Assessing quality criteria

A brief summary presentation is a vailable for download below.

SIG Leader Announcements and Update

Please particiate in our online survey here.

Contact Details

Please email administrator@adee.org for more details.