ADA President Ron Tankersley, D.D.S., is questioning parts of a report released last week by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation that advocates midlevel dental providers, according to an ADA News story.
The report, "Training new dental health providers in the U.S.," by Burton L. Edelstein, D.D.S., president of the Children's Dental Health Project, offers an analysis of the training of dental therapists and other existing and proposed dental health professionals. The dental therapist model, Dr. Edelstein said, has a long history of successfully expanding care to underserved children as part of a comprehensive system of care managed by dentists.
"The principal barriers to underserved populations receiving the same dentist-provided care as other citizens are program underfunding and bureaucracy. We should begin there, rather than looking to new, untested workforce models as a stopgap solution," Dr. Tankersley said in a statement, ADA News reported.
