Kristin Zakariasen Victoroff

Developing a public health leadership graduate program responsive to a global perspective

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe a new public health leadership graduate program, and the incorporation of a practical global perspective to health leadership education using contemporary organization development inquiry methods to develop a case‐based learning strategy using graduate student‐authored cases.Design/methodology/approach – Case‐based curricula have been designed for the leadership and organizational change courses in the Public Health Leadership MPH Program that promote a global orientation and relevancy by having graduate students individually develop cases based on their experiences and observations in their own health care and social systems. They develop these cases using an extensive series of Appreciative Inquiry questions that focus on successful leadership practices, and the key stages involved in leading successful sustainable change. This method gives the students a framework to analyze leadership and leading change cases from the perspective of what the leaders t...

A multimethod investigation including direct observation of 3751 patient visits to 120 dental offices.

This report defines verbal interactions between practitioners and patients as core activities of dental practice. Trained teams spent four days in 120 Ohio dental practices observing 3751 patient encounters with dentists and hygienists. Direct observation of practice characteristics, procedures performed, and how procedure and nonprocedure time was utilized during patient visits was recorded using a modified Davis Observation Code that classified patient contact time into 24 behavioral categories. Dentist, hygienist, and patient characteristics were gathered by questionnaire. The most common nonprocedure behaviors observed for dentists were chatting, evaluation feedback, history taking, and answering patient questions. Hygienists added preventive counseling. We distinguish between preventive procedures and counseling in actual dental offices that are members of a practice-based research network. Almost a third of the dentist’s and half of the hygienist’s patient contact time is utilized for nonprocedure behaviors during patient encounters. These interactions may be linked to patient and practitioner satisfaction and effectiveness of self-care instruction.

Interprofessional Clinical Experiences in Dental Education

Interest and activity in interprofessional education (IPE) has grown substantially in recent years across the health professions, driven by the belief that more effective interprofessional collaboration among providers will contribute to realization of the Triple Aim objectives articulated by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement—better individual care experiences, better population health, and reduced per capita cost of care. In dental education, new standards from the Commission on Dental Accreditation (CODA) in 2013 require that dental schools demonstrate that graduates are competent to communicate and collaborate with other health professionals, requiring dental educators to develop IPE curricula and assessment at their institutions. One of the more challenging aspects of IPE curriculum development is to provide meaningful interprofessional clinical experiences for students. The purpose of this paper is to review selected examples of interprofessional clinical experiences involving dental students and to describe an interprofessional clinical experience implemented at the authors’ institution.