The Massachusetts General Hospital was founded in 1811 and is renowned for the care it provides to patients from around the world. The hospital has over 900 beds and offers postdoctoral training programs in most medical and surgical specialties and subspecialties. The Massachusetts General Hospital Division of Dentistry is part of the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery.
Dental residents rotate through the two practices of the MGH Division of Dentistry - one in Boston on the main hospital campus and one in Danvers, which is a suburb 19 miles north of Boston. For this reason, access to a car is advised for residents.
The Boston office is an 11-chair facility with digital radiographs and electronic medical records. Specialists are available in endodontics, periodontics, prosthodontics, pedodontics, orthodontics, facial pain, and oral and maxillofacial surgery. Dental residents spend most of the day for six months treating regularly scheduled outpatients for comprehensive care, and the rest of the day seeing inpatients on consultation. These consultations may be requested by a wide variety of hospital services, including cardiac surgery, hematology/oncology, and neurology. In addition, residents manage adult and pediatric dental rehabilitation cases in the operating room under direct supervision of an attending dentist.
The Danvers dental office is a 10-chair facility located in an MGH satellite facility that also houses primary care medicine, pediatric surgery, cardiology, radiation oncology, urology, and obstetrics/gynecology. The dental practice utilizes electronic medical records and digital radiographs, including CBCT. Specialists are available in periodontics, endodontics, pedodontics, orthodontics, facial pain, and oral and maxillofacial surgery. In addition, adult and pediatric dental rehabilitation is performed on a day surgery basis. In this community setting, residents will spend most of their time, two days each week for five months, providing comprehensive dental care for regularly scheduled outpatients.
OBJECTIVES:
Residents are expected to:
- Gain experience in four-handed dentistry
- Learn the daily operations of a private practice
- Gain experience in advanced general dentistry
- Learn the financial management aspect of patient care
- Gain expertise in oral diagnosis, oral pathology, and the management of medically-compromised patients
- Develop skills in communicating with physicians and other health care professionals
- Become skillful in writing consultation notes and presenting clinical patients for discussion
- Gain experience in OR dentistry including review of history, prescribing and performing treatment, and documentation
- Learn to diagnose and manage patients with facial pain, including TMD