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QUALITIES OF A HEALTH PROFESSIONAL

The most important qualities of a Health Professional are:

1. the ability to communicate effectively
2. an underlying compassion for others
3. unyielding integrity
4. unbending patient advocacy
5. competence and knowledge of their profession
6. critical thinking skills

If another quality could be included, it would be a balanced outlook on life, allowing effective connection to yourself, to others and to the environment. Having a balanced outlook on life allows one to be respectful and to treat people with civility.

Recent graduates with a college education who might apply to the UNLV School of Dental Medicine can be expected to have all of these qualities to a certain degree. The student will develop into a successful health professional and will grow in their profession during their dental school experiences and after graduation. Non-traditional students, who are older and have other degrees also have these qualities. In addition, they bring more life experience with them, which enhances the ability to think critically. In a Health Professions Program, we expect our students to further develop the capacity for compassion and the understanding of professional integrity by testing themselves in real life experiences. Our best students will grow immensely in compassion and integrity along with their competency as a Health Professional.

Students will learn and improve their capacities to demonstrate these qualities in several ways.

1. Communication skills will be enhanced and many learning activities that utilize communication skills, both written and oral will be provided. Frequent feedback will be provided to students on communication skills throughout the learning experience using formal and informal methods. Role models with expert communication skills will be part of learning experiences for students in preceptorships and in seminar groups. Students will have the opportunity to work on these skills individually and in groups, using role play and patient feedback as well as benefiting from mentoring by faculty and staff.

2. Compassion for others, like communication skills can be enhanced by role play and patient feedback as well as by mentoring through faculty and staff supervision of student experiences. Important to this learning objective is the foundational knowledge of diversity and multicultural environments in which the Health Professional works. Students will have the immersion experiences necessary to enhance understanding as well as skill development in translating compassionate care across cultural boundaries.


3. Integrity — Real life ethical dilemmas are a constant feature of Health Profession life. Students will be grounded in the critical thinking skills of ethical decision-making, and will be provided with feedback and supervised discussion and analysis of real life ethical decision-making as they advance in their professional roles.

4. Patient advocacy — An effective Health Professional needs the knowledge and the competence to navigate the complex environment of healthcare. Starting with ethical reasoning, the student will also be provided with opportunities to learn about the legal, regulatory and practice management dimensions of the dental profession. Whether the patient presents with chronic disease, issues of abuse or neglect, inability to manage the financial and health issues of care, or mental health problems, the health professional has the knowledge and position to support patient needs. Students will have learning opportunities in several different settings to increase their understanding and competence in dealing with the healthcare environment. This ability to interface between the patient and healthcare networks will enhance the patient advocacy capabilities of the developing health professional.


5. Competence and knowledge of their profession is critical for the health professional. Students will have opportunities to learn broadly about their chosen profession, as well as focusing on the special competence and knowledge associated with the orofacial complex and its interrelationship with the whole body in health and in disease. Specific skills for the dental profession will be learned because they represent some of the absolute criteria for achieving competency and moving to graduation from the UNLV School of Dental Medicine. Progression toward competency is a four year process and students will have significant opportunity for individualization of pace, and for enrichment and augmentation of their capabilities during the learning experience.

6. Critical thinking skills — Students who elect to attend the UNLV School of Dental Medicine are already able to think critically about their goals and objectives for life. However, critical thinking is the underlying necessity for a Health Professional because a Health Professional has made a commitment to take responsibility for the life and welfare of others outside their family and friends. This special avocation is fulfilled by understanding broadly the role of the health professional in educating patients and providing informed patient consent as well as by gathering data for diagnosis, testing outcomes of treatment, and understanding safe limits of practice. Learning how to use critical thinking skills in the context of clinical practice is a core value demonstrated by the multiple supervised real life experiences students will have during their predoctoral dental program. One of the ways that critical thinking skills, in the context of clinical professional behaviors, will be greatly enhanced is by the implementation of a vertical team concept to integrate students at different experience levels with expert practitioners.

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