CDA Essentials 2019 • Volume 6 • Issue 4

Mention “geriatric dental care” and negative stereotypes can abound: feeble seniors in wheelchairs, with full dentures, wasting away in an institution with no dental care. But in today’s world where “80 is the new 60,” baby boomers are living longer and better, thanks to advanced care and improved oral health. They are aging with at least 70% of their natural teeth—and they need knowledgeable dental professionals who will treat their probable complex dental needs over the long haul. Heather Conn Ms. Conn is a freelance writer/ editor and writing instructor who lives and works in Vancouver and on British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast. For the first time, our country has more seniors than people under the age of 15, according to a 2016 Statistics Canada census. As part of this tidal “grey wave,” the nation’s fastest-growing group is people 100 years or older. The mean age of seniors in a Providence Health Care facility in BC is 83 to 86, says Dr. Chris Wyatt, University of British Columbia (UBC) Dentistry professor and prosthodontics program director. UBC’s Geriatric Dentistry Program (GDP) provides dental services for more than 2,700 geriatric residents in 27 long-term care facilities on the Lower Mainland. Consider how this aging population and its oral care needs have increased in just one decade, from 2002 to 2012: • the number of long-term-care residents accessing dental care almost tripled, from 894 to 2,668 • dental exams increased by half, from 996 to 1,504 • five times as many treatments were provided, from 201 to 1,073 In response to these changes, UBC Dentistry recently restructured and enhanced its dental geriatric content. Thanks to a new dedicated curriculum and recent research at UBC (see p. 25) on geriatric care, the faculty of dentistry stands at the educational forefront of Canada’s response to the dental needs of a frail, elderly population. In September 2017, the faculty introduced the first of two new curriculum modules that focus solely on an elderly patient group; this is part of a two-year rollout. The new Dentistry 430 Dental Geriatrics I for third- year undergraduates began in September 2017. A new fourth-year companion course, Dentistry 440 Dental Geriatrics II, was launched in the fall of 2018. Also for the first time, UBC Dentistry has integrated geriatrics curriculum into its graduate students’ periodontics and prosthodontics clinical courses; this, too, started in September 2017. For graduate periodontics students, geriatric clinical and didactic courses began in 2011. But now, knowledge gained from research and from GDP clinical work has been integrated more deeply into the curriculum of both specialty areas, says Wyatt. 23 Issue 4 | 2019 | Reprinted/adapted from Impressions magazine, with permission from the University of British Columbia faculty of dentistry.