Association of Residency Program Directors in Endodontics
Welcome to our association website
The Association of Residency Program Directors in Endodontics (ARPDE), a first of its kind dental residency Program Director association, was established by leading educators in endodontics. The purpose is to serve as a unified organizational voice for its residency Program Director membership, who seek to maintain excellence within their postgraduate endodontics training programs.
The tradition of dedicated Program Director associations within Medicine has been in existence for several decades, across all specialties. Currently over 50 organizations of academic physicians promote the role of residency Program Directors in achieving excellence in graduate medical education. Hopefully, the ARPDE will represent the first of many such future associations founded within postgraduate academic dentistry.
Vision
To maintain the standards of excellence in endodontics residency education through the collaboration, professional development, scholarship, and innovation of its membership.
Purpose
ARPDE is the organization that provides resources, develops best practices for endodontics residency training programs, and offers professional development for endodontics residency program directors.
Mission Statement
To provide endodontics residency program directors a forum for the presentation, discussion, review and potential resolution of issues that are important to all stakeholders within postgraduate endodontics education.
Recent Blog Posts
Recent trends indicate our specialty may be the only one within dentistry that is entering into another “golden era”, in terms of our increasing market shares of both patients and treatments, vs. those of our general dentist colleagues.
Are these seemingly positive changes for endodontic specialists directly related to the perceived erosion in live patient competency standards within predoctoral endodontics education? Overall, are today’s dental students graduating arguably less competent and therefore less confident with providing endodontics-related treatments for their patients than at any previous time in recent history?
Are our endodontics residency programs being directly impacted by the two ongoing crises in predoctoral dental education, i.e. the critical shortages in both patients and endodontist teaching faculty members, as more commonly encountered within those schools having endodontics residency programs? Historically, teeth were wholesale extracted during the focal infection period during the early 20th century. If fundamental restorability skills are not being adequately learned and employed, especially for compromised teeth, is that history being repeated?
On the idea of the fallout from an existing organizational epistemic bubble:
Is our leadership mired in organizational indecision, devoted to maintaining the status quo, both resistant and reluctant to consider bold and inspired, progressive educational initiatives?
In other words, isn’t endodontics education worth saving too?
We all know endodontics Program Directors only meet formally together as a complete group once every three years. The last time was a year or so ago. Did the agenda for that meeting include discussions or workshops aimed at directly addressing important and timely issues relative to postgraduate endodontics education? No, none of the meeting time was set aside for this important purpose. In effect, it was largely the typical CE social event and not a planned business meeting, with minutes kept, where pertinent issues and policies impacting postgraduate endodontics programs could be discussed and debated; where each individual endodontics Program Director attendee could have their voice heard regarding contemporary educational issues, even if just once every three years. Consequently, it is impossible as individual Program Directors to reconcile the public-facing “educational support” message we are told with the private Program Director reality found within academic endodontics today. This planned avoidance of our group as a deliberative and consulting body effectively means our aggregate input is neither solicited nor desired when making policy decisions.
As neglected and largely forgotten dental educators today, we are uniquely marginalized relative to those colleagues of ours who are working within the other academic dental specialties. Many of those program directors meet annually to enjoy having substantive, all-hands-on-deck group discussions. We are left to wonder with envy what it must be like to be so respected, to actually have our collective thoughts and opinions frequently heard and recorded.
How can any such educational policy decisions be viewed as being truly representative of our specialty, when our large and important stakeholder group has been intentionally excluded?
Lastly, how can we as Program Directors ever hope to be permitted to introduce, let alone implement the necessary and majority-driven progressive changes while laboring under the burden of such an antiquated leadership structure?
The perennial Match applicant selection question:
Is the specialty of endodontics stuck in the past regarding this important contemporary issue that directly impacts the lives of the applicants to our programs, as well as those of our residents?
Especially when considering that all of the other major dental specialties have already elected to make the progressive change to using the Match system for residency applicant selection, primarily because such an admissions system rightly favors the applicants and not the programs.
Moreover, given the fact that the applicants themselves are not granted a vote, why won’t our specialty at least formally entertain a discussion of this topic with the Program Directors, as a group, so we can work together to facilitate a constructive debate that would then lead to a mutually agreed decision?
Read the blog posts and see the EndoMatch website link below. (Public)
Re: The Board Certification process in Endodontics:
Should we consider following the lead of our orthodontics colleagues, by rendering our oral BC examination process entirely virtual, and thus making it less costly, more efficient, and more applicant-friendly? The number of successful board certification candidates within the specialty of orthodontics has greatly increased within the recent past, largely due to such progressive changes.
Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.
Henry Ford
Useful Links
QUESTIONS?
Whether you’re curious about the Association of Residency Program Directors in Endodontics, or would like to request membership information while serving as a currently active Program Director, please contact us.