Cohort March 2023: Faculty of Dentistry – Mario Brondani, Grace Barlow, Shuwen Liu, Pavneet Kalsi, Annika Koonar, Peter Murphy, Lydia Chen, Bruna Brondani
Project background
Undergraduate dental students have identified a lack of diversity in the existing Problem Based Learning (PBL) and Dental Applied Learning Experience (DALE) cases they discuss during their academic training, particularly within the courses Fundamentals of Medical Sciences I and II (DENT 410 – FMS I; DENT 420 FMS II) as the two largest courses that utilize PBL and DALE.
Such identification came as some of SaP students are currently experiencing these courses, while others have already experienced earlier in their training. Such lack of diversity and representation include the characteristics and identifiers of most patients portrayed in the cases and the characteristics and identifiers of the attending health care providers mentioned in the cases as they do not coincide with the general characteristics of the population students will be interacting with after they graduate. Also lack of diversity was identified in terms of treatment outcomes and case resolution depicted the cases, as mostly were successful and uneventful when in fact, there is an expected failure to occur lading to patient dissatisfaction. It is imperative to improve the diversity of our PBL/DALE case scenarios.
Project objectives
The objectives of this funding is to engage undergraduate students in revising some of the existing PBL/DALE cases from the FMS I and II course mentored by the course instructors (Dr. Murphy) and the DEI Director (Dr. Brondani) to ensure representation of patients, health care providers and case outcomes to better reflect the actual pool of patients they will be interacting with upon graduation. More specifically, the objective is for the cases to more realistically portray individuals and communities who have been systematically marginalized and excluded from the health care system, including those members of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, those who have and experience disabilities, those living in larger bodies, those of Indigenous descent, and so on.
Such modifications would not only enhance the diversity of patients represented within the cases, but also would more accurately reflect the profession of dentistry and the community it serves. Although not all cases need to be revised, the forthcoming revisions led by the students themselves provide future health care providers – graduates – with more opportunities to actively think about the barriers to care that many groups and populations face based on their inherent characteristics, to understand the impact of the social and commercial determinants of oral health, and to consider their own internalized biases and learn to refrain from stereotyping and racializing certain populations in practice, which goes along the UBC call against racism. Along with improving the presented scenarios on PBL/DALEs, this initiative will inform how to better educate the tutors – instructors that run these cases to use inclusive terminology as means to train students to be more inclusive with language; these will happen during the tutor meetings that take place before the cases are discussed with students.