About the Department of Community Dentistry
The Department of Community Dentistry has several programs which involve health services, education and research and are a resource for graduate students studying dental care systems. These programs have as their goal the protection and improvement of the oral health of individual patients and of the community at large. Faculty members of the department have research programs of their own and teach and serve on committees of graduate students from various departments of the University (Community Health Nursing, Epidemiology, Nutrition).
The Department has organized a research network of 255 general dentists in northern Ohio as a laboratory for health services research in dentistry. This network includes 45 African-American dentists, gender distribution that slightly oversamples female dentists, urban, suburban, and rural dentists and an age distribution similar to that described in national samples. Dentists drawn from the network have participated in two pilot direct observation studies, two studies of attitudes towards tobacco cessation programs in dental practice, and a study of computer usage in dental practice. A 4 year NIH grant supports a major direct observation study of prevention in dental practice that will involve 120 network practices and over 6000 patient visits. The principle investigator for this $2.3 million grant is Stephen Wotman DDS.
The Department of Community Dentistry also has underway an ongoing program involving all four years of dental students in the placement of dental sealants on all 2nd, 3rd and 6th graders permanent molar teeth who attend the City of Cleveland Public Schools. This program involves referrals to dentists for additional care, education of teachers , public school students, parents, and dental students. The program is supported ($600,000 annually) by the St. Luke's Foundation of Cleveland , and the educational component is supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation ($500,000 over four years) and the Cleveland Foundation. During the 2008-2009 school year, the Sealant Program visited 86 schools and treated over 6,200 children with 18,000 sealants.
The School of Dental Medicine also provides a wide ranging clinical service program housed within the School. (It maintains its own "dental hospital"). This program provides service to 55,000 patients a year and includes all of the dental specialties. It provides a laboratory for study of all of the management issues that typify an ambulatory setting.
The faculty of the Department of Community Dentistry includes: James Lalumandier DDS, MPH, Professor and Chair (dental sealant program, research network), Stephen Wotman DDS, Professor (direct observation study, distribution of African American and Hispanic dentists), Suchitra Nelson PhD, (Epidemiology) Associate Professor, (health services researcher), Kristin Victoroff DDS, PhD, Associate Professor (attitudes of dental practitioners), Kristin Williams DDS, MPH, Assistant Professor (dental sealant program, direct observation study), James Houston DDS, Senior Instructor (dental sealant program), Catherine Demko PhD, Assistant Professor (Epidedmiologist- direct observation study, Ohio supported study of smokeless tobacco), and Joseph Sudano PhD, (Medicine)(Health Sociology) coinvestigator on direct observation grant.
