Postgraduate dental resident education: A pilot in age-friendly "mentation" training.

Objective: Postdoctoral dental education in caring for older adults lacks didactic and clinical training in mentation topics, one of the core elements of the Age-Friendly Health Systems (AFHS) framework. Our primary goal was to launch a pilot project in clinical geriatrics focusing on older adults' mentation concerns, with a secondary goal to improve dental residents' confidence and competence in dental care and oral health.

Background: Age-friendly care elements are not routinely incorporated into the dental education of residents caring for older adults with cognitive impairment or dementia. Therefore, we implemented a pilot educational project, providing the missing educational opportunity for residents in geriatric training covering cognitive impairment and focusing on Alzheimer's disease and related dementias.

Materials And Methods: We designed educational sessions through a needs assessment, focus group discussions, and expert validation. We developed three e-Learning modules covering mentation concerns and dementia screening. We tested the modules in a pilot study of 15 dental postdoctoral residents as an essential part of their clinical practice.

Results: The dementia dental learning module increased the residents' satisfaction with didactic preparedness (4.45  0.97) and knowledge acquisition (4.36  0.84). Residents strongly believed that learning about the AFHS-mentation topic would improve patient care.

Conclusion: Our pilot study is a pioneer project in support of a new AFHS-themed dental curriculum for clinical education. Further expansion of the age-friendly principles to include mobility, medications, and what matters to older adults will establish a model framework of redesigned geriatric dental education for academic centers.