I had the pleasure to host Dr. Gerald Smith, spokesperson for the ongoing campaign the Ontario Dental Association is holding to ensure adequate funding for the Healthy Smiles Ontario program. Dr. Smith is a general dentist from Thunder Bay, ON. He has been an active member of ODA, contributing to various committees and becoming the ODA president in 2014.  If you would like to share your thoughts, questions, or suggestions, please do so by emailing us at oasisdiscussions@cda-adc.ca Until next time! Chiraz Guessaier CDA Oasis Manager Highlights The Ontario Dental Association (ODA) has developed a public campaign focused on children ...

I had the great pleasure to interview Dr. Lawrence D. Robertson, retired Pediatrician and President of the non-profit group QUEST: Quantifying, Understanding, and Eliminating Severe Tooth Decay in American Indian Children. The group tries to understand why indigenous children experience much higher caries rates and caries severity than other children, and why the recommended caries control measures that have been implemented are not producing their intended results of decreasing and eliminating tooth decay in these children. Since 2009, with the support of the American Dental Association and DentaQuest Foundation, Dr. Robertson has organized 7 symposia on caries in American Indian children. ...

Dr. John O’Keefe invited Dr. Les Ennis to share his lessons from overseas dental missions. Canadian dentists are world renowned for their volunteer efforts aimed at providing oral care to underserved populations.  There are numerous resources available if you wish to participate in these missions. Below you will find links to some of them.  If you have a question or if you wish to share your feedback and suggestions, please get in touch with us at oasisdiscussions@cda-adc.ca Dr. John O’Keefe Director, Knowledge Networks, CDA Resource Australian Dental Association: Handbook for Dental Volunteer Projects.  Journey with Dr. Ennis in Kenya, in ...

Access to oral health care services is a global challenge. One program is leveraging the ease of technology use to facilitate access to populations that would otherwise be deprived.  Drs. Paul Glassman and Andrew Tseu joined me in this interview to speak about the Virtual Dental Home program that was developed by Dr. Glassman and has been implemented by the Hawai’i State Department of Health under the oversight of Dr. Tseu. The program has proven very successful and is now extending from the Big Island of Hawai’i to the island of Maui.  It is always encouraging to know that there ...

Dr. Tamanna Tiwari recently published a review of studies that looked at how the process of acculturation enhances or inhibits oral health and oral healthy intervention in children. She kindly accepted to do an interview with me in which she further explained the concept and its importance.  Dr. Tiwari is Assistant Professor in the Department of Community Dentistry and Population Health at the University of Colorado’s School of Dental Medicine. As usual, if you find the information valuable, let us know! Share your thoughts, questions, and suggestions with us through oasisdiscussions@cda-adc.ca Until next time! Chiraz Guessaier CDA Oasis Manager Highlights For ...

I had the great pleasure of meeting Dr. Mary Ellen Macdonald, Associate Professor in the Division of Oral Health and Society Research in the Faculty of dentistry at McGill University and the founder of the McGill Qualitative Health Research Group (MQHRG).  The qualitative approach to biomedical and oral health research has for a long time been stigmatized as a soft or less rigorous research approach. However, today, researchers are realizing the inability of many quantitative methods to answer complex research questions, in particular if used as stand-alone methods.  Dr. Mary Ellen Macdonald founded the McGill Qualitative Health Research Group as a safe space ...

It was a great pleasure for me to host Dr. Bob Schroth, Assistant Professor in the Department of Oral Biology in the Faculty of Dentistry; and the Department of Pediatrics & Child Health in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Manitoba. He joined me from Winnipeg to speak about an article he recently published on the higher degree of severe early childhood caries that young indigenous children suffer from.  The title of the article is: Microbiome Associated with Severe Caries in Canadian First Nations Children, published in the Journal of Dental Research (2017). I hope you enjoy the interview. Please share your ...

The initial responses I have received to recent Oasis posts asking about the smartest and dumbest decisions colleagues made during their first five years after graduation from dental school, and passing on some of those tips, have been very encouraging and interesting. I wish to share more of these tips over the next few weeks, on an anonymous basis, and I also wish to talk privately in more detail with the colleagues who have indicated to me that they are happy to share more granular information with me – on a confidential basis. The overall goal of this project is ...