Combating the Silent Othering in Dental Education, Dental Public Health, and Community Health Practice to Advance...

Achieving oral health equity continues to be a goal with seemingly intractable challenges. While interprofessional education and practice (IPE/IPP) have been strategies employed to address barriers underlying persistent health disparities, there must be a recognition of the formation of dominant and subordinate cultures across learning and practice environments when diverse professionals are brought together to support diverse populations, creating an identity or professional othering.

A review of settings that feature IPE/IPP, particularly dental education, dental public health residency settings, and community health centers, demonstrate the need to acknowledge that this othering occurs. Combating the systemic and social processes that contribute to othering in these environments is key to delivering a sustainable dental public health workforce and advancing health equity.

Interprofessional collaboration is a requisite for modern population health initiatives, and dental public health practice must include skills for cultural fluency, complex system navigation across disciplines, and ethical engagement with diverse communities for greater impact on health disparities. In these fields where collaboration across disciplines is commonly articulated, yet often fails to fully deliver on its promise, the issue of othering frequently goes unspoken.

Commitments to health equity must make essential the acknowledgment of and address the subtle exclusion that persists across health disciplines. Without confronting the profound marginalization that othering permits across the oral health professions, efforts to improve oral health outcomes will fall short of their full potential in truly cultivating health equity.