Comparison of dental licensure, specialization and continuing education in five countries.

Dental practice and education are becoming more globalized. Greater practitioner and patient mobility, the free flow of information, increasingly global standards of care and new legal and economic frameworks (such as European Union [EU] legislation) are forcing a review of dental licensure, specialization and continuing education systems. The objective of this study was to compare these systems in Canada, France, Germany, the UK and the US. Representatives from the five countries completed a 29-item questionnaire, and the information was collated and summarized qualitatively. Statutory bodies are responsible for licensing and re-licensing in all countries. In the two North American countries, this responsibility rests with individual states, and in Europe, with the countries themselves, mainly governed by the legal framework of the EU. In some countries, re-licensure requires completion of continuing education credits. Approaches to dental specialization tend to differ widely with regard to definition of specialities, course and duration of training, training facilities, and accreditation of training programmes. In most countries, continuing education is provided by a number of different entities, such as universities, dental associations, companies, institutes and private individuals. Accreditation and recognition of continuing education is primarily process-driven, not outcome-orientated. Working towards a global infrastructure for dental licensing, specialization and continuing education depends on a thorough understanding of the international commonalities and differences identified in this article.

Dental concepts in the Unified Medical Language System.

OBJECTIVE: Currently, no comprehensive, controlled vocabulary for dentistry is available. The objective of this study was to determine how well the Unified Medical Language System, the largest repository of concepts and terms in biomedicine, represents dental concepts. METHOD AND MATERIALS: The dental subset of concepts was extracted from Unified Medical Language System using the software program APEX (APplication for the EXtraction of domain-specific concepts). The relationships contained in the Unified Medical Language System Metathesaurus were used to locate the concepts related to 12 seed terms. The Encyclopédie Médico-Chirurgicale (513 dental terms) and the Diagnostic Codes developed by Leake et al (124 terms) were compared to the dental subset. Terms were classified as exact match, related term, or no match. The resultant matching characteristics were compared to those determined by the National Library of Medicine/Agency for Health Care Policy and Research Large Scale Vocabulary Test. RESULTS: The dental subset of Unified Medical Language System contained 948 concepts. The Encyclopédie Médico-Chirurgicale and the Diagnostic Codes exhibited similar matching characteristics for exact match (61.6% and 58.9%, respectively) and related term (38.0% and 32.2%, respectively). For no match, the matching frequencies were significantly different (P < .001). CONCLUSION: The Unified Medical Language System may be a comprehensive source of terms suitable for various representation requirements in dentistry.