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2005 ADEA Annual Session |
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As I do each year at this time, I am pleased to report to the House of Delegates on the activities of the Central Office over the past year. Although this annual responsibility provides the occasion for reviewing recent actions and accomplishments, it is also an opportunity to step back and gauge how the Association is evolving over time. Thinking strategically is always a challenge when daily responsibilities demand constant attention, yet doing so is necessary if we are to maintain our focus on common directions. Even as an extremely hard-working, productive association, we cannot be all things to all our constituencies, so we must concentrate our resources and efforts to have maximum impact.
Last year the Board of Directors announced a new set of strategic directions to guide the Association’s work over the upcoming years. This new framework, "The ADEA Strategic Directions 2004–07," was developed over the course of a year with input from all components of the Association and was formally adopted by the Board in 2004. This report will examine our efforts within these four areas over the past year.
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Strategic Direction #1. Recruitment, Development, Retention, and Renewal of Dental and Allied Dental Faculty |
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In this environment, the nurturing and recruitment of faculty are critical priorities for the future of dental education and of dentistry. Many ADEA activities are designed to respond to this priority.
Assistance with the first "R"—recruitment—has been a major focus for the Association over the past few years, reaching a new level with the establishment of the innovative ADEA Academic Dental Careers Network (www.ADEA.org/adcn/). This web-based dental, allied dental, and advanced dental employment search tool is designed to provide information about academic dental careers and to facilitate communication between institutions and job-seekers. The ADCN now has over 1,000 registered users, with 229 provider accounts from 111 institutions. Fifty of the fifty-six U.S. dental schools are represented, and 227 CVs have already been posted.
The ADEA Careers in Academic Dentistry DVD, designed to encourage students to consider careers in academics, is another feature of ADEA’s recruitment effort. To date, more than 1,400 of these DVDs have been distributed, and the program in streaming video (www.ADEA.org/adcn/video/stream/index.html) on the ADCN website receives an average of sixty unique hits each month.
To support faculty recruitment, ADEA also provides primary central venues to advertise postings for dental and allied dental faculty positions. In addition to the postings advertised on the ADCN, classified and space ads for jobs appear monthly in each issue of the Journal of Dental Education (JDE) and the Bulletin of Dental Education (BDE). In the past year, more than 300 ads in the JDE and BDE have helped make the connection between institutions seeking to fill positions and individuals looking for first-time or new positions. Beyond the employment ads, the BDE also supports this strategic direction by providing faculty with timely application information on fellowships, awards, and other educational and research. Finally, the September student issue of the BDE, which is distributed to each dental and allied dental student in the United States, included an article on how to prepare for an academic career.
Recruiting faculty members is of course only the first step. ADEA regularly devotes resources to help with the "Development, Retention, and Renewal" of dental and allied dental faculty as well. Throughout the year and especially at the ADEA Annual Session, we provide numerous professional development opportunities to faculty members in a variety of venues and formats. The 2004 ADEA Annual Session, for instance, offered twenty-six Faculty Development Workshops and thirty-three Lunch and Learn sessions, plus over 100 assorted symposia, section programs, and other programs. In addition to the opportunity to attend these programs and, in many cases, earn continuing education credits, ADEA members are the primary organizers of these workshops and programs—which is a professional development opportunity in and of itself.
Throughout the year, many faculty members of the Association benefit from additional programs, meetings, and conferences on more focused topics. In 2004, individuals participated in the midyear meeting of the ADEA Section of Business and Financial Administration and the ADEA Section on Clinic Administration (BFACA); the midyear meeting of the ADEA Section on Dental School Admissions Officers and the ADEA Section on Student Affairs and Financial Aid (AFASA); the ADEA Predental Advisors’ Workshop prior to the ADEA Annual Session; the ADEA Allied Program Directors’ Conference; and the ADEA National Minority Recruitment and Retention Conference. The 2004 ADEA Deans’ Conference addressed a significant clinical issue by expanding the content and length of the meeting to include a seminar focusing on the teaching of implant dentistry in the predoctoral curriculum. Following the Implant Conference, the first-ever ADEA Advanced Education Summit was held to explore the opportunities and problems associated with expanding implant education in the predoctoral dental curriculum.
The ADEA Academy of Dental Educators Task Force worked steadily throughout 2004 to measure the level of interest throughout schools and programs for a possible academy that would recognize the scholarship of teaching and learning. And the ADEA Membership Task Force explored ways to encourage more dental and allied faculty, students, and others to join ADEA to benefit from the many meetings and networking ADEA has to offer. There will be further discussion of the outcomes of both task forces at the Annual Session in Baltimore.
Aside from these activities, the ADEA awards, fellowships, and scholarship program provides a number of career support opportunities to faculty members. In 2004, approximately seventy applications for six ADEA awards and fellowships were considered, and more than $80,000 was awarded. In addition, the JDE each year honors up to six junior faculty members who have published in the journal that year, in an attempt to encourage junior faculty to conduct and publish research.
Leadership development also continues to be a priority for the Association. In 2004 in Vancouver, ADEA held its second ADEA Allied Dental Faculty Leadership Program. Fourteen allied dental faculty completed that program and join the twenty-two graduates from the 2003 program. The ADEA Leadership Institute is a premier leadership program in health professions education. With the 2005–06 class, there are now 110 fellows, drawn from forty-four dental schools, four community colleges, the Naval Postgraduate Dental School, and one hospital-based program. Not only are these individuals receiving hands-on training that helps them promote their own careers, but they have shared what they learned through numerous peer-reviewed articles published in the Journal of Dental Education. An ADEA Leadership Institute Alumni Association has now formed to foster continued leadership development and to serve as a means for alumni to give back to ADEA and dental education. ADEA’s Best Practices in Dental Education 2004 also featured three articles on recruitment, retention, and development of faculty.
The Journal of Dental Education, ADEA’s flagship scholarly journal, provides another source of professional development for faculty because it offers readers the best scholarship on teaching and learning, educational methodologies, evidence-based dentistry, curriculum development, and transfer of advances in the sciences to dental education. The JDE also offers faculty members the opportunity to serve as peer reviewers (149 dental and allied dental faculty were involved in 2004) and to publish in its pages.
The broad scope of the JDE is demonstrated by the fact that, in 2004, the journal published 355 authors. These authors came from forty-seven U.S. dental schools, plus eleven more institutions of higher learning in the U.S., and a total of eighteen countries. Aside from academics, authors came from fourteen related organizations and corporations, including the ADA, ADHA, and the NIDCR. Clearly, the journal is not only highly valued by ADEA members, but it’s the place where the best minds in dental education want to be published.
The reach and impact of the journal, as well as its ease of use for all readers, expanded exponentially in 2004 with the launching of the online version. We placed 3,771 articles and abstracts (published in 1969–2004) online initially. References include hyperlinks to Medline and the online text of many other journals. In the first three months of the journal being online for members/subscribers, its homepage received an average of 18,500 requests per week, with more than 2,600 requests per day. We are grateful to our Corporate Members and the ADEA Council of Sections who made going online possible.
Finally, there is an additional "R" that ADEA provides faculty members: Recognition. Faculty achieve recognition through their presentations at the ADEA Annual Session, by being selected for awards, and by appointments to committees and task forces in dental education. Many also receive special "kudos" in the BDE, dental education’s community newsletter. In 2004, sixty faculty members had their promotions and other accomplishments publicized in the BDE, while another sixty-five received recognition in BDE articles.
In a less tangible sense, it is no exaggeration to say that ADEA serves as the adhesive that binds all dental faculty members, indeed all of dental education, in a common network. ADEA is the community of dental educators—the friendly town square where faculty, old and new, go for information, resources, and support in their scholarly pursuits.
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Strategic Direction #2: Financing Dental and Allied Dental Education |
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Of course, the price of dental education to the student and the true cost of dental education to the school are two different things. The expenses of academic dental institutions include faculty, staff, physical plant, equipment, and all the other operational costs. Data collected by ADEA and by the ADA Survey Center show that tuition, fees, and clinic income in 1998 covered only 36 percent of dental school expenditure per student.1 That means that roughly two-thirds of the cost of providing education for students must be met through federal, state, and local funding along with endowments, gifts, and alumni support.
Tuition and fees for all types of allied dental education programs and students have also increased over the past five years. During this time, tuition for dental hygiene programs increased 17 percent for in-district students and 37 percent for out-of-state students. Dental assisting programs have seen similar increases, and community colleges continue to experience the budget squeeze.
Clearly, the financing of dental and allied dental education is a complex, multifaceted subject. So what can ADEA do to help?
First, as in all things, knowledge is power—so our first priority is to gather, analyze, and report data that can be used at the institutional, state, and national levels to monitor trends and educate dental education’s various constituencies. In 2004, ADEA conducted five major surveys, all of which touch on financial issues in some way. These are the ADEA Survey of Dental Educators, ADEA Faculty Vacancy Survey, ADEA Senior Survey, ADEA Survey of Dental Student Financial Assistance, and ADEA Applicant Analysis Survey. With information collected from all fifty-six dental schools, 8,000 dental school applicants, 17,700 dental students, 4,443 dental school graduates, and 11,350 dental school faculty, these surveys provide a comprehensive portrait of the profession. After data from these surveys are collected and analyzed, Association Reports on each are published in the JDE, thus making the information widely available. A listing of these Association Reports appears at the end of this report.
Second, ADEA is aggressive in advocacy efforts for dental education, especially at the federal level. Legislatively, in 2004 ADEA monitored more than 150 pieces of federal legislation dealing with a variety of issues impacting health care, dentistry, health professions, biomedical and dental research, and higher education financing; of these, we actively advocated for twenty bills. More than 250 announcements in the Federal Register were also monitored to determine the impact of notices, proposed rules, and final rules. In efforts coordinated by the ADEA Central Office, nearly three-quarters of the deans of U.S. dental schools or their representatives visited fifty-three congressional offices, and 175 dental students representing forty-six schools visited 200 congressional offices.
Advocacy efforts continued to address problems and issues raised by the implementation of the new rule promulgated by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services with regard to Dental Graduate Medical Education (GME) payments to hospitals for dental residents training in dental schools and clinics. A survey of U.S. dental deans revealed that twenty-six of the thirty-two schools with Dental GME agreements would lose all or most of their GME funding as a result of the new rule. Other efforts include advocating that GPR and AEGD residency training programs be transitional years, eliminating the requirement for a hospital to have a written agreement with a dental school for GME payments for residency training programs, and making Oral and Maxillofacial Radiology and Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology programs eligible for GME payments. ADEA also requested that the Provider Reimbursement Review Board hear appeals of seven hospitals with GME dental agreements with regard to problems involving the GME "effective date" issue.
In a major move to bring more strength, coherence, and coordination to our advocacy efforts, ADEA’s Legislative Advisory Committee and the American Association for Dental Research’s National Affairs Committee have merged to create the National Oral Health Advocacy Committee (NOHAC). Its goals are to identify and propose solutions to the public’s oral health problems; heighten the visibility of oral health as a core component of good health; increase oral health literacy; ensure increased funding for dental education, research, and oral health care; and accelerate the transfer of research from the bench to practice. By combining the expertise and resources of both groups, NOHAC will provide critical advice and counsel to the ADEA and AADR Boards of Directors with regard to advocacy initiatives at both the federal and state levels.
Third, ADEA participates in numerous national meetings with groups that address financing dental education; these include the National Association for Advisors to the Health Professions, the National Association of Medical Minority Educators meeting, the Professional Development Conference for Health Professions Financial Aid Officers, and the ADEA AFASA and BFACA meetings. The Association also provides significant amounts of information to students regarding how to finance their dental education. Both the ADEA Official Guide to Dental Schools and ADEA’s Opportunities for Minority Students in U.S. Dental Schools include in-depth chapters on the subject.
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Strategic Direction #3. Meeting the Oral Health Care Needs of a Diverse Population |
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Other aspects of the problem, however, require more work, and ADEA continues to heed this call.
ADEA President Frank Catalanotto effectively led our membership and others to a new understanding of our profession’s need to increase access to oral health care services. Not only did he elevate the concerns expressed by the surgeon general’s report on the growing evidence of a shortage and maldistribution of dentists and allied dental personnel in the face of a growing and increasingly diverse population; he also challenged us to consider the ethical framework of our profession. He asked whether we are focused on the right issues and have an adequate understanding of cultural competency and diversity issues as they affect access to care. We in the Central Office have been honored to assist him with this effort. This year, the ADEA House of Delegates will consider the adoption of a Dental Faculty Code of Conduct to affirm the ethical values deemed essential for appropriate dental and allied dental faculty.
Aside from using ADEA’s national platform to spotlight the issue, we have been involved in numerous innovative efforts to increase access to oral health care. ADEA’s long-held position is that, without minority practitioners, access to care can be limited or absent in minority communities throughout the nation.2 We continue to work with The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the California Endowment, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation on the Pipeline, Profession, and Practice: Community-Based Dental Education program that was launched in 2001. ADEA has played a significant role in the development and execution of this program, which represents the largest commitment of resources to dentistry and dental education ever made by private foundations. This $1.6 million program is designed to help fifteen dental schools increase the time students spend in clinics treating underserved patients; prepare students for treating underserved patients through didactic and clinical courses; and recruit more underrepresented minority and low-income students to dental school.3 In addition, the ADEA/W.K. Kellogg Minority Dental Faculty Development Program brought $2.4 million to eleven schools over a six-year period. The program grants will enhance minority faculty recruitment while promoting health systems change focusing on primary care.
Several of ADEA’s meetings also direct attention to this issue. The semi-annual ADEA National Minority Recruitment and Retention Conference, held this year in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, focused on best practices and models of success for increasing diversity of both students and faculty. The network for this conference included multicultural/diversity/minority affairs officers at fifty U.S. dental schools. In addition, ADEA’s Predental Advisors Workshop, held just before our Annual Session each year, targets predental advisors, admissions officers, and career and guidance counselors who shape the career directions of dental and allied dental students. ADEA’s 2004 AFASA meeting also focused on the issue—adopting five action items including plans to promote diversity in dental school enrollments through collaboration between schools and further encourage implementation of noncognitive factors in admissions decision making.
ADEA has become a part of two major activities that address diversity in a broad context and across the health professions and higher education. First, ADEA is a major partner in the Health Professionals for Diversity Coalition involving fifty other major health professions organizations. The coalition will promote the value of diversity in the training of health professionals and in health outcomes. Second, Enrollment Management and the Law is a collaborative sponsored by the College Board. ADEA is one of the sponsoring organizations, along with the nation’s medicine, dentistry, law, and graduate schools. The collaborative will develop pragmatic strategic planning, legal, and policy tools to help institutions meet their diversity-related goals that are legally sound. This two-year project will focus on financial aid and scholarships, recruitment and retention, and admissions across higher education.
In addition to devoting significant time and resources to increasing underrepresented minorities in dental education, ADEA has continued its efforts to increase the number of women students and faculty. Women now constitute almost 26 percent of faculty (up from 17 percent in 1990) and 43 percent of dental students. Ten of the fifty-six dental deans are women, and forty-three of fifty-six schools now have one or more women department chairs. Ten women scholars have benefited from the ADEA Enid Neidle Scholar-in-Residence program, and fifty-two of the fifty-six dental schools have women liaison officers. This network of women serves to improve the academic environment through mentoring, networking, and information exchange. In 2004 we began planning for the Third ADEA International Women’s Leadership Conference on Oral Health to be held in Montréal in August 2005.
Diversity in population, of course, means even more than gender and race in what has always been called "a nation of immigrants." More than ever before, ADEA is asserting that excellence in dental education knows no borders. With more dental schools conducting programs for foreign-trained dentists and the recognition that dental education programs in all countries can learn from each other, ADEA has taken several steps to support the interconnectedness of the U.S. and global oral health communities. The introduction of an online version of the JDE is greatly expanding the journal’s readership internationally, at the same time that the scholarship of more authors from outside North America is being published in its pages. This year also the impact of ADEA’s Second International Women’s Leadership Conference on Oral Health was extended with the publication of presentations and workshop reports from the conference as a supplement to the JDE. ADEA also played a key role in developing the Women’s Health Information Network through a $10,000 grant. This network will be an online resource for millions of women throughout the world.
Finally, a major function of ADEA that contributes to this strategic direction is its management of student application services. The accuracy and reliability of this vital function have been put to the test recently, due to significant increases in the number of applicants—but I am pleased to report that we are passing the test with flying colors. For the 2004 entering class, there was a 17 percent increase in applications, and we anticipate that the applicant pool in the 2005 entering class cycle will increase by another 10 to 15 percent. There are more than 9,000 AADSAS applicants this year, with many schools experiencing substantial growth in the size and diversity of their applicant pools. ADEA’s centralized application service for postdoctoral students, PASS, welcomed eighteen new programs during the last cycle and processed more than 2,700 applications. The new PASS Program Search Engine, which allows prospective applicants to search programs by specific criteria, received approximately 64,000 hits between July and November of 2004.
We have also strengthened efforts to ensure quality and diversity in the future applicant pool by developing recruitment displays and participating in three national pre-health professions student recruitment fairs, two of them targeted toward underrepresented minority and low-income students. Through these efforts, information was distributed to about 1,000 students. ADEA also participated in the National Association of Advisors to the Health Professions meeting, including distributing information to more than 700 advisors, and participated in the National Association of Medical Minority Educators meeting, distributing information to pre-health program directors.
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Strategic Direction #4. Curriculum Development and Design to Meet the Changing Needs of the Field and the Profession of Dental Education |
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ADEA’s attention to the issue of licensure was elevated considerably a year ago when the 2004 ADEA House of Delegates passed a resolution endorsing a national clinical exam. Our position has always been that all the communities of interest—educators, students, practitioners, and examiners—must be involved in making the needed transition from a system of disparate state and regional testing for clinical licensure to a uniform national exam, and we have been seeking to work collaboratively with these groups to do so. We are committed to a national clinical licensure exam that is valid and reliable, involves patients in an ethical way, and has been developed with input and governance from all the communities of interest. We can assure you that ADEA’s officers and staff will continue to represent the educational community to the best of our ability in this arena, and will keep you posted on developments as they occur.
Significant progress has also been made this year in curricular reform, which goes hand in hand with licensure reform. In October 2004, ADEA organized and conducted a historic meeting on predoctoral dental curricula, bringing together representatives from the Commission on Dental Accreditation, the ADA Council on Dental Education and Licensure, the Joint Commission on National Dental Examinations, and a number of ADEA members to develop strategies for implementing innovative curricula. ADEA has engaged these groups in a collaborative effort to improve the content of the National Boards, to enhance accreditation standards, and as the unifying goal, to take meaningful steps in the creation of future curricula. The ADEA Council of Sections has assumed a major role in collaboration with other ADEA Councils and communities of interest to develop a new document, "Competencies for the New General Dentist," as a basis for curricular innovation.
Curriculum developments in allied dental education have also been significant. In 2004, the ADEA Council of Allied Dental Program Directors’ Administrative Board initiated a major review and revision of the Compendium of Curriculum Guidelines for Allied Dental Education Programs. Nearly forty allied dental educators contributed to the document. This compendium, which is now available, will serve as a curriculum development aid, particularly for new programs and new allied faculty. A focus group on Allied Dental Education was held in January at the ADEA Central Office. It included representatives from the ADHA, ADAA, Delta Dental, NADL, ASAHP, NIDCR, the ADA, and AADE. The group discussed the role of accredited allied dental and dental academic institutions in preparing the allied dental workforce for the future. This was the first time that representatives from the major players in allied education all came together to collaborate and consider new ways to prepare students. As an outcome of this focus group, plans are under way to hold an ADEA Allied Dental Education Summit Conference.
Aside from these developments, ADEA supports the ongoing scholarship on curriculum development and design by publishing articles on the subject in the JDE and by supporting research supported by various sections in the ADEA Council of Sections and the council’s Project Pool.
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Support Activities Underlying Work on the Strategic Directions |
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Embracing appropriate technology contributed to this savings. In 2004, the ADEA website hosted 3,000 pages and received 7 million hits, including 500,000 unique visitors. ADEA’s 118 listservs serve more than 10,000 member subscribers with more than 480 postings annually. There was a 60 percent growth in the amount of information stored on Association servers, accomplished without new infrastructure or staff. ADEA’s IT infrastructure also processed more than one million incoming and outgoing emails while detecting and deleting more than 35,000 infected emails.
As you know, in August 2004, the ADEA Central Office moved for the first time in two decades. This process involved moving more than 700 boxes, sixty-five people, and fifteen truckloads of furniture, computers, equipment, and files. It is remarkable that this move was accomplished with only seven hours of interruption to Central Office business hours and four total hours of interruption to online member and application services!
This report has provided metrics and data so that you can better evaluate our progress on many fronts. However, none of these accomplishments in 2004 would have been possible without people—the elected volunteer leadership of the Board of Directors, Council Administrative Boards, House of Delegates, member volunteers who serve on committees, councils, task forces, commissions, and our dedicated staff. It has been an honor to work with the seven Council Vice Presidents and three elected principal officers. Two of our current Vice Presidents, Dr. Jerry Glickman, Vice President for Sections, and Dr. Jim Swift, Vice President for Hospitals and Advanced Education Programs, as well as Dr. Paula Friedman, Immediate Past President, will complete their terms of office at the close of the 2005 Annual Session. Their contributions to the Board’s discussions will be missed, but their work will long be remembered.
A special note of gratitude goes to our 2004–05 President, Dr. Frank Catalanotto, who truly embodies the best dental education has to offer. Frank has been an outstanding representative for the Association and a thoughtful and articulate advocate for the many issues we have addressed.
As we move forward on ADEA’s strategic directions, and the hard work and many daily tasks the effort entails, let us not forget to acknowledge that we are indeed living in momentous times for dental education. We wouldn’t have it any other way.
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Footnotes |
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REFERENCES |
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