Providing quality dental care for autistic children
Children with autism : helping children with autism and their carers access and cope with dental care. How to think smarter about people who think differently.
Welcome
Welcome to this blended learning course for Dental Core Trainee's (DCTs) on Children with autism: helping children with autism and their carers access and cope with dental care. How to think smarter about people who think differently.
Here you will find the course learning outcomes as well as instructions and resources to explore the delivery of quality dental care for autistic children. This blended course content comprises; pre-reading resources, group work and a live interactive session.
Certain video content links are accessible only to those within the predefined DCT1 learning group for the relevant Public Dental service (PDS) training cohort. Please contact the team email if you have any queries about this.
Aim and learning outcomes
Learning outcomes
By the end of this blended course you should be able to:
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Define autism in its variety of presentations and know about the previous classifications and terminology.
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Analyze video resources and case-based resources to deepen insight into some of the challenges autistic children and their families may face in the dental environment.
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Develop a toolbox of strategies for your dental team to overcome these challenges.
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Add to a stock of resources (story boards, communication tools, pre-visit questionnaires, online resources) to help to communicate effectively with autistic children and their families.
Aims
This course aims to develop the DCTs insight and awareness of the challenges of providing dental care for children with autism.
The course will introduce and develop strategies which help children with autism and their families to access and cope with dental care.
Development Outcomes:
1) (A) Effective Communication
2) (C) Knowledge & Skills Development
3) (D) Maintaining Patient Confidence
Presenter introduction
Guy Jackson, Senior PDS dentist (NHS Highland) Introduction video
Link to the pre-course trainer introduction video in the Team PDS Learning Event stream channel.
Course reading
Please read the following material prior to our live session, it will greatly increase your knowledge and understanding prior to our discussion on the day.
Links to National Autistic Website:
Group work
In small groups meet with zoom, teams, phone etc to discuss the following papers; these will be discussed in further detail at the live session. Think about what you have learnt from the article; how could this be implemented into your practice; and would there be any challenges in this? It would be beneficial to take notes of your group discussion and nominate a spokesperson from your group to feedback.
Groups and topics will be allocated on Teams by your Core Training Adviser.
For each resource: select 3 things (knowledge / understanding / perspective) you have acquired and briefly explore these using:
- What have you learned?
- So what? Why is this important / relevant to your practice?
- What next? What might you change? How might you apply this in practice?
Group 1
Thomas, N., Blake, S., Morris, C., Moles, D.R. (2018) Autism and primary care dentistry: parents’ experiences of taking children with autism or working diagnosis of autism for dental examinations. International Journal of Paediatric Dentistry. 28: 226– 238 [accessible through the knowledge network]
Group 2
Advice for parents of children with autism British Society of Paediatric Dentistry
Hamilton, M. (2017) Dentistry and autism. Scottish Dental Magazine. June 20th, 2017