Oral Health & Disease in Populations (CPD) / Course details

Our Oral Health and Disease in Populations CPD course will give you a broad understanding of dental health issues and how they may be prevented or managed at a service and population level.

Dental problems continue to cause much morbidity and incur large treatment costs, despite effective preventative management being possible for most of these problems.

In high income economies, historical patterns and complex vested interests have constrained change.

Through this course, you will learn to assess needs for oral healthcare and plan a service to meet them. You will also understand how policy and strategy are formulated, as well as the principles of managing performance and evaluating outcomes.

Some of the topics covered by this course include how to measure dental disease and identify inequalities and their determinant, the impact of dental disease on quality life, and the role of screening, whole population and risk approaches.

You will also study an ethical framework for deciding priorities, theories of rationing in oral healthcare, project planning methods and change management, and economic appraisal methods.

Teaching will be web-based with a high degree of student-led learning through interactive exercises to test understanding built into web-based teaching materials, and exercises and assignments involving seeking out, retrieving and reflecting upon information from a range of mainly web-based resources.

On average, you should expect to spend approximately 10 hours a week on the unit.

You will submit two assessed assignments of 1,500 words mid-semester and 2,500 words at the end of the semester.

Student participation in the online discussion boards also forms part of the assessment for this unit.