1. Act as a primary care provider for individuals and groups of patients. This includes: providing emergency and multidisciplinary comprehensive oral health care; providing patient focused care that is coordinated by the general practitioner; directing health promotion and disease prevention activities; and using advanced dental treatment modalities.

2. Plan and provide multidisciplinary oral health care for a wide variety of patients including patients with special needs.

3. Manage the delivery of oral health care by applying concepts of patient and practice management and quality improvement that are
responsive to a dynamic health care environment.

4. Function effectively within the hospital and other health care environments.

5. Function effectively within interdisciplinary health care teams.

6. Apply scientific principles to learning and oral health care. This includes using critical thinking, evidence or outcomes-based clinical decision-making, and technology-based information retrieval systems.

7. Utilize the values of professional ethics, lifelong learning, patient centered care, adaptability, and acceptance of cultural diversity in professional practice.

8. Understand the oral health needs of communities and engage in community service.

The above are accomplished by specific objectives for each clinical and didactic component of the program, primarily within the context of patient care.

There are planned teaching sessions directed by the members of the attending staff in a structured curriculum. There are over 200 hours of scheduled lectures in the didactic curriculum. Specialty clinic sessions in orthodontics, pediatric dentistry, periodontics, prosthodontics and oral & maxillofacial surgery are scheduled each week. There are no specialty training programs at the Beth, so our GPR’s do ALL of the Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery and ALL of the Operating Room General Dentistry treatment procedures.

Residents have rotations in Emergency Medicine, observing and treating patients under the guidance of a physician; Phlebotomy, performing venipuncture; Physical Diagnosis, learning that includes instruction on history and physicals, systems review, how to listen to and evaluate heart and lungs, how to palpate an abdomen and finding a difficult pulse; and Anesthesia, observing and treating patients under the direct supervision of an anesthesiologist.