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As Tropical Storm Ophelia dumped rain on North Carolina’s Piedmont on Saturday, dozens of people at High Point University gathered inside Congdon Hall auditorium for an unusual ceremony.
After several years of planning, campus leaders and guests were ready to break ground on the new Workman School of Dentistry. The weather wasn’t cooperating, so they headed inside, where 10 shiny shovels on a table awaited them next to a shallow dirt-filled pit on the patterned carpet.
“I’m not sure we’ve ever done a groundbreaking in another building,” President Nido Qubein told the crowd before turning over the land. “That’s a big step. A really big step. You can do a lot of things in college, but when you start talking about dentistry, you’re talking about something big.”
Internal progress wasn’t the only remarkable part of what was happening on the High Point campus.
The new dental school, slated to open for 60 students in the fall of 2024, will be one of only three such academic programs in North Carolina — and the only one at a private institution. UNC Chapel Hill and East Carolina University house the state’s two public dental schools.
The UNC dental school was established in 1950, the first in the state. Sixty-one years later, ECU enrolled its first students in a state-funded dental program designed to address the dentist shortage in rural North Carolina. At first, there had been much debate among dentists and others whether the state needed a second dental school, even though at the time, North Carolina had one of the lowest per capita rates of dentists in the country.
Not just ‘another dental school’
Planning for a third dental school, at High Point University, has been in the works for nearly a decade and a half. The Great Recession sidelined the project for a while, but momentum picked up again a few years ago.
Scott de Rossi, founding dean and professor at High Point Dental School, was dean of the UNC dental school when he was first approached about the new project. Initially, he was reserved.
“I had no interest in creating ‘another dental school,'” de Rossi recalled in a phone interview with NC Health News.
As dean of the UNC dental school, de Rossi and some of his younger colleagues tried to “do some innovative things,” he said. But entrenched bureaucracies and the slow wheels of government funding for long-established public university programs often made the latest change difficult, he added.
So when de Rossi discovered that High Point University was willing to entertain the development of another academic model, he drew up a business plan.
Then the opportunity to build a program from the ground up lured him from the dean’s post at UNC after four years on the job and into uncharted territory at High Point in January 2021.
Try a new model
One of the drivers of the new model is the development of High Point University satellite dental practices throughout the Triad.
The city of High Point spans four counties — Guilford, Randolph, Davidson and Forsyth — all of which are considered dental health professional shortage areas, according to the Rural Health Information Center.
For several decades, North Carolina has ranked in the bottom 25 nationwide for the number of dentists per 10,000 residents in the state.
In 2001, according to a report compiled by the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at UNC Chapel Hill, the state ranked 47th in the nation with only 4.2 dentists for every 10,000 residents. There was little improvement in 2013, when North Carolina was 44th in the nation with 4.8 dentists per 10,000. The numbers climbed to a ranking of 37 in 2017, and last year the state was 24th in the nation with 5.6 dentists per 10,000 people, just below the national average of 6.1 for every 10,000 residents.
The majority of dentists practicing in North Carolina who were not educated at one of the state’s two dental schools are from Texas, South Carolina, Virginia, New York and the nation’s capital, the Sheps Center report found. Dentists leaving North Carolina go to Virginia, South Carolina, Texas and Florida, the report said.
The state added 586 dentists between 2017 and 2021, but they hung out their shingles mostly in urban counties. Sixty percent, or 351, went to five counties — Durham, Guilford, Mecklenburg, Pitt and Wake. Another 20 percent, or 119 dentists, were added to the list in Brunswick, Moore, New Hanover, Orange and Union counties. Only 116 dentists went to the other 90 counties.
Forty-five percent of the population growth from 2017 to 2021 was in Durham, Guilford, Mecklenburg, Pitt and Wake counties, according to the Sheps Center. The same counties make up nearly a third of the state’s total population of nearly 10.7 million people.
Community care
There are five dental practices at High Point University Health, an LLC owned and operated by the university, according to de Rossi. The goal is to have 30 practices in the network within a 60- to 65-mile radius of the high point, helping to address shortages in some of the areas that don’t have a wealth of oral health care providers for the population size. .
In addition to serving counties in need of more dentists, the satellite offices will provide opportunities for HPU dental students to gain hands-on experience as part of their clinical rotations during their years in school. Additionally, a portion of the proceeds from those businesses will go to the dental school to help offset costs.
A $32 million gift from the Rick and Angie Workman Foundation will also help greatly with construction and operational costs.
Rick Workman, founder of Heartland Dental, a network of more than 1,650 offices across the country, was in High Point Saturday for the groundbreaking. He recalled his first meeting with Qubey and how drawn he was to the didactic philosophy the president had for the dental school he wanted to build.
“Some of us of a certain age have memories of our dental education – and I know it’s come a long, long way since then – but back then, it wasn’t very humanistic and we weren’t really valued as people.” said Workman, a 1980 graduate of Southern Illinois University’s dental school. “It seemed like sometimes, maybe it was just to me, that the things you had to learn were kept a mystery.
Workman spoke about training dentists to have the community leadership skills, compassion and understanding of science and technology needed to run a modern dental practice.
“They have to know that while they have to learn the sciences, and they have to learn the technical clinical skills, to learn that leadership and interpersonal communication, how to lead a team, your staff, how to interact with patients, how to be a member valued by your community, it’s very important to yourself, very important to the dental profession,” Workman said.
Workman told the crowd gathered for the innovation that he never dreamed coming out of dental school that he would be in the position he is today to be able to contribute to the development of a new dental school.
“When I went into dentistry, it was 98 percent male, 98 percent white,” Workman said. “My class had the highest percentage of women in the United States, 15 percent. That was seven. Two of them were named Luanne.”
“But by the late ’80s, one could start to see that education was rising, women were advancing rapidly as a percentage of the population, it was becoming much more diverse,” Workman added. “And you could see, I felt, the way it’s always been done — for dentists to graduate, get a shingle out, spend 30 to 40 years of their lives in a community, in an office — that might not be the case. life for the next 40 years”.
High-tech simulators
The Workman School of Dental Medicine will be housed in a 77,000-square-foot building with labs that have mannequins and a haptic augmented reality simulation, which has been described as something akin to a flight simulator that can replicate the feel of a real tooth. and its pulp.
At some of the top dental schools, students practice their skills on patients, often not hearing from the supervising practitioner until after they have completed a procedure. In some schools, students practice with plastic teeth placed inside a fake mouth, which may not reflect the differences they encounter when working with someone in the chair.
The haptic simulators, de Rossi said, will give High Point University dental students real-time feedback as they try out procedures hands-on before testing their skills on humans.
Cutting-edge technology and innovation were common refrains at the groundbreaking ceremony, which came nearly a month after the Commission on Dental Accreditation granted the Workman School its initial accreditation, a longer-than-expected process due to pandemic delays.
Annual tuition and fees will be $85,000 to $89,000, lower than some other private schools and less than the 2021-2022 national private tuition average of $92,850. It will be higher than the state public school average of $55,000. Although 60 students will be selected from over 1,000 applicants for the inaugural year, the school could eventually accept up to 80 students in each class, according to de Rossi.
The admissions process is considered one that will not require standardized tests or prerequisite courses. There will also be no application fees, although an Acuity Insights assessment will be required and applicants will have to pay the associated cost.
While the new campus building is being erected, the school will be in the former Chamber of Commerce building, which was purchased by the university in 2022. Construction is scheduled to be completed in 2025.
De Rossi, who received his dental degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s dental school, described the weekend ceremony in High Point as “a momentous occasion.”
“We’re here for an innovator, but I’d like you to reflect on the word,” de Rossi told the crowd, noting that the word is defined in the Cambridge Dictionary as “innovation or innovative and likely to have a effect on how things are done in the future”.
“The Workman School of Dental Medicine will be groundbreaking with its innovative curriculum of care, its new admissions processes, its unprecedented oral health networks spread across the Triad, across the state, providing care to citizens of North Carolina, ensuring that our students receive pre-eminent clinical and didactic education in authentic settings,” said de Rossi. “We will be relentless in our pursuit of integrating medicine and dentistry to improve health outcomes. . And with a state-of-the-art, 77,000-square-foot building, we will discover, develop and deliver better health.”
This article originally appeared in North Carolina Health News and is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license.
