Expanded curriculum targets the entire team for success in sedation dentistry
Terri Ruggeri is a registered dental hygienist with more than 25 years of clinical dental experience and operations leadership. As Continuing Education Program Director at DOCS Education, she leads the development of live, streaming, webinar, and online educational programming for dental professionals. She is also developing DOCS Education’s expansion into Team Training, including the DOCS Dental Assistant Apprenticeship Program to help practices develop successful entry-level dental assistants while providing a pathway toward national certifi cation. She looks forward to continuing to advance innovative continuing education programs to meet the evolving needs of successful dental professionals and their teams.
Find out why Terri Ruggeri, RDH, Continuing Education Program Director at DOCS Education, believes a team-centered training curriculum for sedation dentistry:
• Allows the experienced faculty at DOCS Education to train the whole practice, so everyone understands their role and speaks the same clinical language.
• Prepares practices to implement a patient-sedation workflow safely and confidently.
Each year, thousands of patients opt out of critical dental treatment. Their reasons range from dental phobia and acute anxiety to chronic scheduling constraints that make it hard to complete multiphase treatment. But the clinical evidence is clear: Lack of dental care is a direct path to secondary health complications, and sedation dentistry can remove the barriers that keep patients from getting the care they need.
At DOCS Education, we’ve expanded our curriculum so practices can train as a team, and we've seen firsthand that practices adopting this approach gain clinical efficiency and better patient results.
Choose Your Format
DOCS Education offers online courses, interactive live streaming, and in-person training, so practices can choose the format that best fi ts their schedules. With online and live-streamed courses, training comes right into the office, and the whole dental team can attend together.
Because live-streamed sessions are interactive, team members can ask questions and hear the answers to those questions, which increases the knowledge level for everyone.
Breakouts for Team Workflows
Some parts of the training bring the whole office together, while others split into 2 breakouts: 1 for doctors and 1 for the team members.
In the team breakout session, dental assistants, hygienists, office managers, and administrative staff learn side by side. They cover how to spot anxious patients, the clinical workflows that support sedation, treatment presentation, communication, scheduling, and patient instructions.
Meanwhile, doctors work through the clinical side of sedation, including patient assessment, diagnosis, medications, protocols, decision-making, and treatment planning.
Creating a Cohesive Approach to Sedation Dentistry
I believe the whole-team training formula creates a more cohesive approach to sedation dentistry. Even though each team member likely has a different role and responsibility, starting on the same page and learning as a team results in team members being able to seamlessly put to work what they’ve learned as soon as the practice adds sedation to its dental workflow.
Another benefit of this team approach is that it saves the dentist from having to train the rest of the team. Doctors offer sedation to their patients, but it’s the entire practice team that ensures a safe and successful experience for the patient.
