The impact of technological endodontic resources on the training of the general dentist

Technological resources are considered important for the practice and training in endodontics. It is not yet clear the extent of the insertion of these resources in predoctoral dental programmes and the effect of such resources to the general dentist training.

To evaluate the faculty perception regarding the insertion of technological resources, particularly rotary instruments, and the impact of such resources to the student's learning process graded at the end of predoctoral dental programmes in Brazil by the National Students Performance Exam (ENADE).

The endodontic department faculties in all 205 programmes that participated in the 2016 ENADE received a questionnaire by email. The institution, faculty credentials, and insertion of technologies in each programme were described, and an association between these data and the ENADE score was tested.

149 educators (72.7%) answered the form. From this total, 73.2% of them were from private institutions and 26.8% from public ones. Educators mix manual and rotary instrumentation to treat selected patients in 47.7% of the programmes. Most educators (89.9%) consider the utilisation of technology in endodontics as positive. Whilst there was not a significant association between the use of rotary instrumentation and better performance in ENADE, there was a significant association between the performance and the supply of special instruments by the institutions.

These results show that even though most faculties consider the insertion of technologies as positive, the factor that caused a significant impact to the training of the general dentist is the general infrastructure of the institutions.