Teaching Cultural Comptency through Geriatric Dental Education

Dental education in the past decade has been tasked to train dentists with the skills to treat the rapidly increasing elderly population. At the same time, in response to the 2002 Institute of Medicine report, “Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care”, the inclusion of a cultural competency component in the undergraduate dental curriculum has been advocated. Due to the pressures of limited resources and curriculum time, dental schools have not been able to sufficiently address these two areas. Looking at the current state of instruction of both modules in US dental schools, we find that geriatric dentistry has outpaced cultural competency in terms of development of course materials and integration into the curriculum.

This paper draws similarities between the current guidelines and objectives for geriatric dentistry and cultural competency and identifies the synergies and overlap between the two; we propose that the respect and sensitivity required in cultural competency can be effectively taught through the lens of geriatric dentistry. Thus, blending of the curricula can address the current failure to adequately teach both cultural competency and geriatric dentistry in the predoctoral curriculum.