Inter-Professional Education Between Dentistry and Law Through a Dental Malpractice Mock Trial and Simulation of...

Mock trials (MT) are simulations of courtroom proceedings and may serve as a tool to improve learning in inter-professional education for health professionals.

To design and implement a dental malpractice MT and simulation of mediation activity, involving dentistry and law students, and to identify the learning principles underlying the activities.

Two previously resolved dental malpractice cases, aligning with the learning outcomes of the Paediatric Dentistry course, were used. Four faculty facilitators (FF) from the Dentistry and Law Schools kept a diary of the project events. After the events, faculty focus group discussions were conducted, led by a faculty member from the Education Sciences Department, and through discourse analysis, learning principles underlying the activities were identified.

Ten dentistry and eleven law student-volunteers participated in this inter-professional education project. The key design steps included recruiting students from both disciplines to identify previously published and resolved dental malpractice cases. The key implementation activities included debriefing of the cases, literature search, assigning roles to the students, producing scripts, organizing rehearsals, and facilitating the simulation of court and mediation performances. The learning principles underlined the activities that were identified included project-based learning, active student engagement, student-centered learning, learning through application of knowledge, reviewing, rebuilding, reframing of knowledge, learning through simulation, and inter-professional exchange and collaboration.

MT and simulation of mediation implementation are alternative educational inter-professional strategies in Paediatric Dentistry for meaningful, student-centred, active learning.