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Provide patient-centered,
quality oral healthcare in a humanistic educational environment.
The primary goal of the clinic mission
statement is to assist the faculty, staff, and students of the
University of the Pacific School of Dentistry in focusing on
the delivery of excellent patient care. Simply, it places patient
care ahead of teaching. We will always strive for both excellent
care for our patients and excellent educational experiences for
our students. In fact, when we provide excellent patient care
we are also providing excellent teaching. At those times when
we must make a choice between patient care and teaching effectiveness,
patient care will take precedence.
There
are three parts to the mission statement: patient-centeredness,
quality care, and humanistic education. Patient-centered
care includes a wide range of objectives. They include
being prompt, efficient, communicative, engaging, focused,
and adaptable. It encourages faculty and staff to be excellent
role models at all times, attentive to individual patient’s
needs, and focused on service. The private practice model is
the ideal style of patient-centered care and the model to which
we aspire.
Quality
oral healthcare involves
providing treatment to our patients that meets the community
standards of care. This very broad concept includes standards
such as complete removal of all calculus during root planing;
cementing appropriately contoured, esthetic fixed prostheses
with closed margins; delivering esthetic, functional removal
appliances; completing endodontic procedures with excellent
canal taper, length, and fill; placing restorative materials
that meet all esthetic and functional requirements; and
extracting teeth with minimal trauma to adjacent structures.
It also means doing so on patients with a wide range of
needs and expectations. Finally, it means providing patients
whom we cannot effectively treat with other options for
their care.
Humanistic
education is
based upon honest communication of clear expectations along
with positive support for diligent effort. It places great
responsibility on each member of the dental school community.
Faculty and staff members must be models of the profession’s
highest standards, teaching and communicating in a way that
encourages and energizes students. Students, in turn, are
expected to set very high standards for personal behavior,
to work hard, and to take responsibility for their own learning
process. A humanistic student/staff or faculty interaction
includes good work ethic, constructive feedback, maintaining
confidentiality, addressing the issue, celebrating achievement,
excellence, high ethical standards, professional responsibility,
increasing independence, and attainment of competency. We
will strive to create an educational environment that is
intellectually stimulating, progressive in scope, competency-based,
and outcomes-focused.
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