Clinical placements
Clinical placements play an essential role in dental education and training. By treating patients, you will gain hands-on experience of providing dental treatment and expand their knowledge of dental theory. Placements not only allow you to develop practical clinical skills, but also strengthen your ability to communicate effectively with both your patients and colleagues. These qualities will be essential when applying for your first positions following graduation.
Your clinical experience in dental hospitals may cover specialist areas such as:
- restorative dentistry
- paediatric dentistry
- orthodontics
- oral medicine
- oral surgery
- pathology
- radiology
Clinical placements during the Covid-19 pandemic
Returning students to placements where it is safe to do so will help to future-proof the profession should further pandemics occur in the future. It will also reduce the risk this pandemic poses to longer-term workforce planning by preventing delays to the registration of newly qualified dental care professionals. With appropriate and planned mitigations in place it is possible to return to the open plan clinical environment and undertake both non-aerosol and aerosol generating procedures.