Developing Professionalism in Dentistry: A Systematic Review

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. Background: Professionalism is a core competency and concern in all health professional education. Evidence from nursing and medicine suggests the evidence base for approaches to developing and assessing professionalism at undergraduate level is weak. In 2015, notifications, imposed sanctions, and in some cases de-registration against dental practitioners for reported incidences of breaches in infection control in New South Wales, Australia, have refreshed the essential need for dental practitioners to promote public safety and protection. To investigate the evidence for clinical education practice approaches to develop professionalism in dentistry. Methods: Relevant electronic databases were searched for full-text peer reviewed papers relating to dental practitioners published between 2000 and June 2016 in English. All research designs were included. Following initial and detailed screening, included papers were independently quality appraised and strength of evidence graded by two independent reviewers. Results: Removal of duplicates resulted in 195 unique papers; following screening 34 full text articles were assessed for eligibility resulting in 15 papers evaluated in this review. Eight different clinical education approaches were identified. Most studies were of low quality and reported low levels of educational outcomes based on Kirkpatrick's Hierarchy. There is a lack of good quality evidence to support any one approach to develop professionalism in dentistry. What evidence there is focuses on low level educational outcomes such as learners experience. Conclusions: Low level outcomes is common in educational research and therefore unsurprising. More disappointing was failure to adequately justify the methodology and the absence on the definition of dental professionalism. The research findings is consistent with the evidence across other health professions internationally. There is scope for an inter-professional approach to tackle the challenge developing and subsequently assessing professionalism.