Towards a biopsychosocial approach in dentistry: the Montreal-Toulouse Model

The biomedical model has been severely criticised in the last decades and its dominance challenged. This is why the concept of person-centred dentistry has penetrated the professional discourse and become a growing concern for our profession. Furthermore, dentists have been urged to take patients' environment more into account and to tackle the social determinants of their health, illness and access to care. Unfortunately, dentists still poorly comprehend person-centredness and social dentistry, and face difficulties to implement biopsychosocial approaches. To respond to these issues, we propose the Montreal-Toulouse Biopsychosocial Model for dentistry, which encompasses patient-centredness and social dentistry. Our model presents three types of tasks (understanding, decision-making and intervening) that dentists should take in each of three overlapping levels (individual, community and society). We also propose a 'Q-List', an original tool designed to help dental professionals adopting this model and reflecting upon their actions. This Q-List includes key questions to elicit dentists' reflexiveness and to support their biopsychosocial practice of dentistry. We invite dental professionals to adopt biopsychosocial approaches and use the Montreal-Toulouse Model as a guide. We also encourage them to use our Q-List and adapt it to their context of practice.