Intellectual Output 3: Research protocol: evaluation of the current state of Oral Health professionals' Education in Europe

Intellectual Output 03's focus was on devising, documenting and quality assuring the overall research protocol that is used to collect data on the state of Oral Health Professionals Education throughout Europe. 

At its cores is the ethical collection, storage and analysis of programme and school level data in a co-ordinated and validated way. Work on this Intellectual Output began in October 2019 at the O-Health-Edu project Kick Off meeting. While each IO was scheduled sequentially, it quickly became apparent that much cross functionality and overlap existed between other intellectual outputs. For example while IO07 was not scheduled until August 2020, its work was a critical point of reference for developing and devising a validated data collection tool and enabling shared understanding within the O-Health-Edu data collection protocol. Thus the work of IO03, IO04, IO05, IO06, IO07 and IO08 are closely linked and work on these IO's is in fact inseparable.

Figure 1 below summarises the specific process involved in created the protocol and data collection instrument. Through iteration and discussion what evolved from the protocol was a real time data collection and analysis hub. You can access a copy of the final survey instrument, pilot study report and the ethical approval received from the ethics committee of the University of Barcelona in the documents section below. 

 

Along with colleagues from the ADEE Executive a additional unscheduled output from the OHE project was short COVID-19 questionnaire  issued to European dental schools open to responses from 25th of March 2020.  The questionnaire aimed to collect data on Oral Health Professional's education's immediate response to the COVID-19 crisis. An open access published commentary on the responses can be accessed on the European Journal of Dental Education here and if you are a registered ADEE.org user you can access charts summarising the responses here. This process provided a valuable learning opportunity for O-Health-Edu with regards to the capabilities of the real time data hub the project proposed. 

IO03 has now completed its work with the launch of the integrated data collection hub.