Meeting the needs of under-serviced communities: one university's externship experiment

Increasingly, the ability to respond to society's needs is becoming a guiding principle for educational institutions. This concept will, in difficult financial times, take on even greater significance when all programs will have to justify their survival by preparing graduates that can work in areas where there is a demonstrable need. The implications of this approach are far-reaching and require years of planning to adjust the current focus of a program to meet the new goals. In this article, a dental program that set out to broaden the scope of its curriculum in order to respond to societal needs will be reviewed.