UW News

July 19, 2002

Dental camp will give youth a rare close-up view of profession

The University of Washington School of Dentistry is teaming up with Washington Dental Service Foundation and GEAR UP (Gaining Early Awareness & Readiness for Undergraduate Programs) to conduct a “Dental Camp” for junior high students from across the state on July 25, Aug. 8 and Aug. 29.

These three half-day sessions, to be held in the School of Dentistry, will provide 75 junior high school students an opportunity to perform hands-on activities used in the practice of dentistry.

The Dental Camp’s hands-on activities will be held in the School of Dentistry’s Simulation Laboratory. The lab is state-of-the-art, remodeled in 1997, and used by faculty to teach courses to pre-doctoral students and to conduct continuing dental education programs for practicing dentists. Each of the 56 workstations in the lab is equipped with a dental patient simulator, dental tools and equipment, and a monitor on which students can view the instructor and video.

The camp will encourage students to learn more about dental careers and steps they can take to prepare. In addition, students will learn about the importance of good oral health. Under the supervision of mentoring dentists and UW dental students, campers will work with a simulator’s teeth and make impressions, models, reconstruct missing portions of teeth, and apply dental sealants.

This camp was developed in response to work by Washington Dental Service Foundation’s Educational Futures Task Force, which identified the need to diversify dental professionals. The WDS Foundation Board committed to address this issue by offering scholarships and supporting programs to promote dental professions. Targeted to students from minority and rural backgrounds, the camp is an initial step to expand the diversity of dental professionals. In 1998, African Americans and Hispanics comprised nearly 24 percent of the U.S. population, but represented less than 10 percent of dentists nationally. The board says that a diverse health-care workforce can improve the health status of racial and ethnic minorities; providers sharing a similar cultural background with patients can improve quality, comfort and accessibility to care.

UW School of Dentistry dental students and faculty will be volunteer mentors for Dental Camp. These volunteers will serve as lab supervisors and educators, conducting discussions about dental careers and oral health science. Plans are also being made to have mentors follow up with the campers once they return home, to encourage students to purse a career in oral health professions.

The campers will be recruited from the GEAR UP program and spend one half-day of their weeklong GEAR UP session at the Dental Camp. Designed by the Washington State Governor’s Office in partnership with the University of Washington College of Arts and Sciences and the Higher Education Coordinating Board, the GEAR UP program encourages low-income, disadvantaged students across Washington to plan for and succeed in higher education. The Washington State GEAR UP program is funded by the U.S. Department of Education.

“With the advancement of outreach and educational programs such as the Dental Camp, the UW School of Dentistry and Washington Dental Service Foundation hope to ultimately expand the diversity of dental professions in Washington and reduce the magnitude of oral health disparities,” says Dr. Douglass Jackson, the principal coordinator for the program. Programs like Dental Camp will help identify the region’s next generation of dental professionals and provide interested students with mentoring to support their aspirations in dental careers.

Jackson, associate professor in the Department of Oral Medicine, has research interests in the neurobiology of acute pain and in oral health disparity research.

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