Residency Rotations

Your weekly schedule will depend on the particular rotation you are on. The clinic day is usually 8:00 AM to 4:30 PM. With 4 residents, rotations are currently divided into Dent. Resident, Private, Surgery, and Children’s Specialty. Regardless of the rotation, you will always maintain a certain amount of private patient time so that you can keep a continuity of care with your private patients of record.

Aside from the informal/spontaneous instruction that arises in the course of clinic activities, residents receive didactic information in rounds and conference. We discuss in-house patients of record, outpatient consults, emergency room patients, operating room patients, upcoming activities, resident concerns. Treatment planning questions that cannot be answered in the course of the clinic sessions can be presented at rounds for everyone’s input.

Friday afternoon residents’ conference is an actual lecture session. The lecturer might be one of our faculty or an outside private practitioner who is a GP or specialist. We also have physicians allied with UVA Health periodically lecture on topics in medicine that are relevant to the practice of dentistry. Some of the dental product manufacturers also provide sales/technical representatives or dentists to lecture on areas of dentistry. Dental laboratories we utilize provide lectures on dental techniques from a clinical and laboratory perspective. Some of the didactic lectures in the second year are skewed towards the oral medicine component.

First-year residents take a Physical Assessment course. This is a combination of didactic and laboratory sessions designed to provide a resident with the basics of physical assessment so that he/she can more appropriately plan dental treatment for medically compromised patients.

Rotations in, ACLS, Dermatology, Emergency Medicine, Anesthesiology, and Otolaryngology would take time out of clinic rotation to participate in the off-service rotation.

The Department provides hospital dental emergency and inpatient consult call coverage 24 hours a day. Any such concerns during daily work hours are managed through our clinics. Weeknight and weekend emergencies or consults are managed by the on-call resident, you are not required to stay in the hospital when on call. The call system employs both resident and faculty backup advice/supervision. Routine or lesser dental emergencies are initially managed by Emergency Room personnel in the form of antibiotics or analgesics, with follow up care.