Continuing professional development (CPD) has been a legal requirement for all registered dentists for the last 14 years, and for all other dental care professionals (DCPs) since 2008. Last July over 35,000 DCPs came to the end of their first five-year cycle, logging a minimum of 150 hours of CPD, whilst 6,000 dentists recently completed their required 250 hours of CPD at the end of January.
The CPD cycle has put a great deal of extra responsibility onto a profession that is constantly facing new challenges, ever-changing regulations and bureaucracy, whilst striving to maintain patient expectations and endeavouring to keep up with the latest technology, techniques and product developments. However rather than looking at CPD being yet another professional burden, it should be looked upon as the opportunity to continually learn and develop skills and techniques to remain on top of these challenges. This can only be a positive thing, and shows that across the board training and education has never been so important.
Many dental professionals are already seeing the benefits of ongoing development and education. In 2011, the General Dental Council (GDC) conducted a survey of its registrants as part of a review of CPD requirements, and amongst the feedback it showed that 64 per cent of those surveyed would carry out CPD even if it were not required for them to do so.
With this positive statistic comes an array of learning centres and styles, potentially making choosing the right one for you and your team a bewildering process. The key to CPD is study; reading, training, and attending courses and lectures with clear educational aims and objectives. This not only allows you to have the chance to practice the latest treatments using the most up-to-date material and techniques, it also helps to add to the quality of overall care you provide, which ultimately benefits the whole practice, but more importantly, the patient.
There are an increasing variety of dental educational programmes, seminars and symposiums available at venues across the country that provide information and training on a wide range of clinical and non-clinical subjects, as well as attracting verifiable CPD hours.
Many dental professionals will attend trade exhibitions, such as the Dentistry Show, where they will be able to get a taste of education in the form of onstand demonstrations, but delegates are often looking for a more in-depth learning programme that delves deeper into the techniques and challenges faced by dental professionals on a daily basis whilst successfully helping to meet CPD requirements.
The 2nd International Expert Symposium – ‘The Quality of Esthetics’, hosted by Ivoclar Vivadent, takes place in London on June 14, 2014. The event promises to deliver topical information on recent developments in modern dentistry; it sits comfortably in the middle of the CPD cycle for some, whilst offers a last minute opportunity for others to top up their numbers and meet their legal requirement.
Many dental companies have long understood the importance of supporting dental professionals, not only with the amount of CPD they have to undertake, but also in the quality and scope of their ongoing learning and development. These companies have a commitment to improving technical and clinical practice across the profession and they offer advanced CPD training and product solutions that help you respond to the many challenges of working in modern dentistry with ever evolving material and equipment.
Learning from experts in their profession and listening to world renowned speakers, through a mixture of lectures and hands-on sessions, can successfully aid this process. In bringing together this level of talent in one symposium, Ivoclar Vivadent aims to educate the profession on innovative monolithic restorations and the accompanying cementation materials, successfully integrating practice-lab concepts, aesthetic restorations, the latest materials and their clinical applications.
Supporting this, James Russell and Robert Lynock will be taking to the stage at the International Expert Symposium to present ‘Step-by-step to all-ceramic success. A clinical and technical perspective’, illustrating how, through close teamwork, patients can be provided with highly aesthetic, natural restorations. The presentation promises to demonstrate a variety of techniques to minimise or eliminate preparation alongside how to make conventional approaches more predictable and aesthetic.
References available on request.