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NUS Faculty of Dentistry enhances its Bachelor of Dental Surgery (BDS) programme with an interdisciplinary Common Curriculum

Starting in August 2023, NUS Dentistry in collaboration with the Alice Lee Centre for Nursing Studies, NUS Medicine, Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, and the Department of Pharmacy, will implement a new interdisciplinary Common Curriculum. This new Common Curriculum for Healthcare Professional Education has been carefully crafted to ensure that the learning outcomes are aligned with the future vision of healthcare with a focus on preventive healthcare and facilitating ageing in place through the use of technology and analytics.

First-year students from Dentistry will join first-year students from Medicine, Pharmacy and Nursing and will be taking five specially designed courses together. They will collaborate across the four healthcare disciplines as part of their learning journey. The Common Curriculum, which is to be completed in the first two years of their candidature, will complement the existing BDS programme.

This cross-disciplinary curriculum seeks to cultivate awareness of social issues, teamwork, communication, ethics and professionalism, digital literacy, and interprofessional education in the context of health and healthcare. In addition, the Common Curriculum aims to equip the students with collaborative skills to engage in population healthcare planning, delivery and evaluation. Lessons are conducted through blended learning with a mix of online and in-person classes, which will be customised to feature group as well as individual learning sessions such as case-based discussions, fireside chats and self-reflection.

Students will also engage in interdisciplinary experiential learning through the Longitudinal Patient Experience, where teams of students from various healthcare disciplines will visit patients in their homes and living environment continually for one year. This immersive learning journey provides students with opportunities to apply the concepts learnt in class to provide holistic care for their patients, and at the same time fosters empathy and resilience in the students.

“As oral health is an important part of overall health, this Common Curriculum will allow our students to better understand oral health in the context of overall health. It will also help them recognise the impact of the broader determinants of health and oral health on patients and the population. At the same time, students from other healthcare professions will also be able to appreciate the significance of oral health. The inter-professional focus of this curriculum will equip students from different healthcare disciplines with the skills to work collaboratively with one another in the future. This will in turn facilitate the holistic care and management of patients and the population,” said Associate Professor Wong Mun Loke, Acting Dean and Vice Dean (Academic Affairs) of NUS Dentistry.

Please refer to Annexe for more information about the Common Curriculum.