Developing the One-Minute Preceptor Model to Improve Clinical Teaching in Emergency Dental Care

Clinician educators who teach dental residents in the fast-paced clinic, such as in emergency dental care, often face numerous challenges. Time for clinical teaching is limited in the setting of significant clinical workload, complex medical conditions of patients, and the need for documentation and satisfaction of clinic productivity goals at the same time. Little is known about effective clinical teaching methods or tools that could enrich learning opportunities and increase dental residents’ clinical competency in a busy clinic environment when there are time constraints to teach. The One-Minute Preceptor (OMP) model is an innovative teaching method originally used for clinical teaching in family medicine residency trainings that has been shown to be an effective teaching tool, resulting in the increased confidence and clinical skills of residents. It focuses on identifying the needs of each individual learner, teaching to the needs, and providing feedback by using a 5 micro-skill approach: get a commitment, probe for supporting evidence, teach general rules, reinforce what was right, and correct mistakes. We propose using the OMP model to teach dental residents in a dental emergency clinical setting to allow the clinician educator to take full advantage of the entire encounter to maximize the time available for teaching and improve clinical teaching efficacy and efficiency and for dental residents to practice clinical reasoning and identify their own knowledge gaps in emergency dental care settings.