CDA Essentials 2018 • Volume 5 • Issue 8

29 Issue 8 | 2018 | I ssues and P eople Dr. Joel Rosenbloom How does the dental rotation at CAMH work? Dr. Joel Rosenbloom (JR): The rotation is structured in two parts. At the end of third year, two or three selected students spend the morning at CAMH for five days, and we rotate through about 35 students over three months. And then in fourth year, every student comes to CAMH for one morning. We rotate through roughly 100 fourth-year dental students. How do students feel about working there, before they do the rotation? JR: I would say some of them are intimidated. The misconceptions about patients with mental illness are 100% based on stigma, which is so unfair to the people who are struggling with mental illness. What do the students do while they’re at CAMH? JR: Each day that they’re at CAMH, students are asked to arrive about 45 minutes before the patients. Together, we look at the entire day of appointments and review the patients’ charts in both the dental record and the hospital’s electronic health record. We look at what they’re coming in for and the planned treatments. We also give the students some background on each patient, the medications they’re taking, the diagnosis they may have, and their personal background. Dr. Joel Rosenbloom wants to dispel the myths about treating a patient with a mental illness. As a staff dentist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), Canada’s largest mental health and addictions facility, it’s a population group he knows well. “The misconceptions about treating a patient with mental illness—that they are going to be unpredictable, violent or difficult to treat—can make people take a step back,” he says. Dr. Bomee Kim Theseconversationshavebeen condensedandedited. T he reality, he maintains, couldn’t be more different. “I’ve had the absolute pleasure of working with clients in this group. They’re just like the rest of us, people who have their own illnesses and struggles and challenges. They seek the same kind of treatment as any other patient; they want us to fix up their teeth and keep them healthy,” says Dr. Rosenbloom. According to CAMH, people with mental illness often report feeling devalued and dismissed by health care professionals, a disregard possibly fed by widespread attitudes about mental illness. To change preconceived notions about what it’s like to treat someone with a mental illness, all students at the University of Toronto (U of T) faculty of dentistry complete a rotation at CAMH. CDA Essentials spoke with Dr. Rosenbloom and Dr. Bomee Kim, a recent dentistry graduate from U of T, to find out more about the CAMH rotation and its impact on students. joel.rosenbloom@ utoronto.ca