Dental ethics as an intellectual discipline: taking the next step

The development of ethics education in dental and dental hygiene schools is traced. In the early 1980s curricula were informal, often incorporated with jurisprudence or practice management courses, and there were few effective educational materials. Over the next decade formal guidelines for teaching ethics had been approved by the American Association of Dental Schools, several texts and journals featuring ethics columns had appeared and PEDNET, the Professional Ethics in Dentistry Network had been created. The next step is to develop a regular forum for publication of papers in ethics in dental care.