Bridging the gap in dentistry education

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On this week's episode of The Vet Blast Podcast, Doug Aspros, DVM, chief veterinary officer of Veterinary Practice Partners, sat down with our host Adam Christman, DVM, MBA, to discuss the inadequacies in veterinary education surrounding dentistry, highlight the importance of providing dental care as a general practitioner, and how to break down procedures into smaller blocks of time to provide better care and accurate estimates for clients.

Below is a partial transcript.

Doug Aspros, DVM: It's clear that [veterinary students] graduate without adequate training, certainly not adequate, sort of day one training. And there are a bunch of reasons for that. One is that the curriculum has expanded to cover a whole lot more stuff than perhaps you and I got when we were in veterinary school. All of that's good, but that also leaves gaps. And because a lot of veterinary hospitals, teaching hospitals, or tertiary care hospitals means they're not doing a lot of sort of routine dental care and so there are not a lot of opportunities for graduates to get that basic education.

Then add to that, the fact that new graduates are reluctant to do the first one. The way I think about developing expertise over time is, you become expert by doing enough reps, but if you don't do the first rep, you can't do the second, you can't do the third, you can't do the fourth. You can't build on your experience to become an experienced and appropriate care provider, and so I think that even more so requires employers, especially employers of new vets, of younger veterinarians, to help provide that care and fill those back gaps in so that, so they can build expertise and become appropriately, great practitioners.