Teaching the Design and Fabrication of RPD Frameworks With a Digital Workflow: A Preclinical Dental Exercise

The conventional method for teaching removable partial denture (RPD) design using a pencil drawing on a solid cast has always been the basis for teaching RPD design in most dental schools at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. This does not apply to RPD fabrication technology, as more laboratories have recently adopted more efficient and versatile digital techniques to design and fabricate RPD frameworks.

At the University of Iowa College of Dentistry, we created a pilot workshop to assess the efficiency of a new approach to teaching RPD design utilizing this new digital RPD technology as a teaching tool for graduate prosthodontics residents. Three first-year prosthodontics residents were enrolled in the workshop, which involved learning the new digital workflow of designing RPD.

This new teaching approach very successfully achieved its educational goals. The residents reported that the digital RPD teaching approach enriched their knowledge and deepened their understanding of RPD design.

The technique garnered significant interest from the students and seemed to also increase their understanding of the steps involved in RPD fabrication as well as the different components of the RPD.