Evaluation of a Bright Futures Oral Health Intervention

Although health professionals must be equipped to promote healthy lifestyles and serve as resources for the public's health information, many gaps in the education and training of residents exist. Health professional students readily admit to deficiencies in their training (i.e. lack of learning principles of prevention, health promotion, behavior change and risk reduction), yet, curricular changes have been slow [1,2]. A 1997 AAMC Medical School Graduation Questionnaire revealed that almost one quarter of graduates felt instruction time devoted to health promotion and disease prevention was inadequate [3, 4, 5, 6]. Mandates for competency-based, post-graduate training by the ACGME Outcomes Project and competency expectations by the AAMC Medical Schools Objectives Project (MSOP) require all residency programs and medical schools to develop innovative approaches to teaching clinical skills.

We believe the resident continuity experience is the perfect venue to implement and practice clinical guidelines and Bright Futures concepts. Past studies have documented that residents in academic, hospital-based sites, similar to those in CORNET, experience the most continuity and longitudinal relationships with their patients [7, 8, 9]. Longitudinal learning is a basic tenet of successful interventions and is easily accomplished during resident continuity practice. Pediatrics in Practice provides key resources for enhancing knowledge in family-centered oral health promotion and responding to the present gaps in medical education and training. Both residents and pediatricians in practice have limited knowledge of Bright Futures and its tenets. Bright Futures: Guidelines for Health Supervision of Infants, Children, and Adolescents represents the framework of providing contextual care to children that fosters partnerships among families, health professionals, and communities and increases knowledge about health education and prevention [10, 11, 12]. Although more competency-based curricula are being designed to promote skills and knowledge in health promotion and preventive services, there has been very little research into their efficacy in trainees.