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Professors João Batista Novaes Junior and Patricia Valente Araujo will take over as director of the Faculty of Dentistry (FAO) on Monday evening, January 22, to command the Unit for the term 2024-2028. The perspective is that of continuity. They will continue the work of Professors Allyson Nogueira Moreira and Denise Vieira Travassos, who led the Unit in the 2020-2024 administration. Open to the academic community, the ceremony, which will be led by rector Sandra Regina Goulart Almeida, begins at 6:00 p.m., in the Professor Hélio de Senna Figueiredo auditorium.
The new directors promise “committed, transparent and supportive” management, focused on humanization. In particular, João Novaes and Patricia Valente declare that they will work to protect the rights of the users of the health services provided in the unit, within the scope of their agreement with the Unified Health System (SUS) and the City of Belo Horizonte (PBH) . ). According to the management plan they presented, these rights will always be encouraged and ensured “at all stages of care, through qualified listening, so that each person is treated as a priority based on the assessment of vulnerability, severity and risk”.
The main goal of the mandate is the completion, in this first semester, of the renovation of the service offices of the unit, work that started during the administration and is now being completed, after a great effort to collect funds and do the work technically. applicable. The reform will allow dental care to return to pre-pandemic levels, with full service in about 200 offices. In the pandemic and post-pandemic context, this capacity was reduced by half, due to health surveillance recommendations.
‘multiply by ten’
Asked about the size of the impact of the pandemic on the activities of the Faculty of Dentistry, Allyson Moreira is direct: “To measure it, take the impact that other units have suffered and multiply it by ten.” There is a reason for this hyperbole. “The dentistry course is extremely practical,” explains Deputy Director Denise Vieira. “The purely theoretical subjects are only the beginning ones. Others connect theory with practice and are very focused on practice. But this practice had to be completely stopped”, he recalls. This was when students were unable to progress in the course.
In addition, when the clinic was finally able to return (still in the context of the pandemic, after making a series of adaptations and establishing new protocols), the health surveillance demanded that physical barriers be created between patients due to the aerosol that spreads during care . . “We didn’t have these structures. The work that is being carried out aims precisely at removing these barriers”, explains the deputy director. Funding for the work – which includes structural intervention and not just furniture – came from a parliamentary amendment by councilor Bruno Miranda. “He’s also a dentist and became aware of the cause,” says Allyson.
However, in the meantime, until the necessary resources and logistics were available to carry out the work, the Faculty of Dentistry had to adapt its space and service model. “Since there were no barriers, we started working separately, leaving an empty office between each office, so that the patients were far from each other. It was the viable solution at the time, but it halved our concurrent service capacity,” Allyson recalls. Upon completion of the work, the problem will be finally solved.
Oh good to know
In order to compensate for the decrease and for the students not to be harmed in the progress of the courses, the leaders and teaching staff of the units began to work twice as much. “The congregation approved, temporarily, a maximum workload so that the teachers could help overcome the problem,” recalls Allyson Nogueira. “While service capacity was halved, Odonto doubled service hours to compensate,” reiterates João Novaes.
“If the course lasts five years, we should have ten active classes, but we have 12, a reflection of the first load at the height of the pandemic. These students will graduate in six years,” says Allyson. The existence of these two additional classes caused, during the last semesters, a doubling of the number of students in two specific periods, which replaced each other semester after semester, with the passage of these hours in the course. “As a result, we have experienced constant adaptation in recent years,” says Novaes.
The new principal explains in more detail what happened: “Since we resumed classes, every semester we had to change the size of the seats for each period, due to the fluctuation of the number of students caused by the loss of retention. It’s a flow that moves like waves, period after period, and involves constantly changing class sizes, constantly reformulating schedules, and redirecting teachers throughout the semester.” This process will be broken once and for all in 2025. of asymmetric class cycles.
With the completion of the reform to remove the barriers between each clinical office in 2024, the clinic will be able to return to operating at full capacity. “We will focus on rebuilding the potential of providing disciplines and providing services at the university, postgraduate and extension levels”, the new leaders emphasize in their work plan.
Evaluating teaching and work
“Our main focus will be the valorization of teaching and work, guided by dialogue with the community through participatory management, proposing the integration and valorization of teachers, technical-administrative workers in education and students, to maintain the collective commitment to run the Faculty of Dentistry. at the highest level of excellence”, add the executives. “We will seek to build relationships of trust, connection and commitment between work teams,” they describe.
Details of the duo’s plans can be found in a document published in August 2023. The platform presents, among other things, the promotion of affirmative action, the integration of FAO with other health areas at the University and the encouragement of student protagonism, “if experimenting with innovative methodologies in different learning environments, or choosing diverse and interdisciplinary curricular paths”.
Dentistry in numbers
129 teachers
105 technical-administrative servers
830 students enrolled in university
In 2022, approx 6.5 mill patients were treated in the unit’s clinic; in 2023, in the first semester alone, more than 4.2 mill patients in different specialties
graduate in the narrow sense with concept 7 (maximum level) in Cape rating.
At the end of 2023, there were 43 students enrolled in the master’s, 79 in Ph.D., 23 in the professional master and 46 in specialization
Profile of new directors
João Batista Novaes Junior, director
He is a professor in the Department of Dental Clinics, Pathology and Surgery since 1999. During his career as a manager, he has coordinated, from 2000 to 2003, the Center for Support, Selection and Referral of Users (Caseu), sector responsible for receiving patients referred by SUS. He was head of department (2006-2010) and chaired the Brazilian Association of Dentists, São João Nepomuceno section (1992-1993).
He has a degree in Dentistry, with enhancements in Interceptive Dentistry and Orthodontics, specializations in Dentistry and Orthodontics, and a master’s and doctorate in Dentistry, with a focus on dental materials. He completed two post-doctoral residencies in dental materials and stress analysis – one at the University of Minnesota, in the United States, and another at the University of Alberta, in Canada.
Patricia Valente Araujo, deputy director
She has been a professor in the Department of Restorative Dentistry since 2010. She headed the clinical care standardization committee, was part of the coordinating committee for the curricular adaptation of the university course, and is currently a representative of the professors in the Chamber of the Faculty Department. of Dentistry. She is also a member of the FAO monitoring and epidemiological surveillance committee and coordinates Caseu.
She has a degree in Dentistry, with two specializations: one in Restorative Dentistry, with a focus on inlays/inlays porcelain, and another in Prosthetics, focusing on temporomandibular disorders. She has a master’s and doctorate in dentistry and has completed more than a dozen additional courses.
Check out the photo gallery from this Monday’s inauguration ceremony:
