Today is my last team meeting before graduation. I can’t even believe it! Time flies so fast. Some of my friends used to laugh at me when I told them this but I was very happy attending my first team meeting at the school because I don’t think I ever had any team meeting at my previous dental school. Every small things count!
Here at UCDenver, we divide every class into 4 teams: C,U,D,T (standing for CU Dental Team I guess). Every single thing ties to your team. I am in team C, so from patient pool, schedule, advocate, coordinator, transferring patient, lab seat, etc is marked with “team C”. ISP class has 40 students while DS class has 80 students. So the whole school has 80 ISP students and 320 DS students. That’s why school need to break down into teams in order to manage and help students better. So we have 100 students in each team: 10 from ISP2, 10 from ISP 1, 20 from DS1 and so on.
Every team CUDT will have 2 coordinators to take care of 100 students, (mainly only 80 students because 20 from DS1 hardly have anything relating to clinic). That’s a lot of work for our coordinators I agree since each of them is in charge of the need of 40 students at one time. Coordinator is the one assigning us patients, helping us with scheduling patients when we have some trouble doing so, dealing with uncooperative patients, sending patients letter of no-show, tracking students’ requirements and performance, etc. Without them, we cannot graduate on time for sure. In short, they are helping us with patient management.
Every small sub-team – like team C ISP2 – will also have an advocate or practice leader. They are faculties at school. They are the ones helping us to analyze what’s difficult and what to expect from this case, who we should talk to about this particular problem, what’s going on with our requirements, how to proceed with these info, etc. I always learn something whenever talking to my advocate and she helps me to avoid so much trouble and wasting time in terms of clinic practice. In short, they are helping us with clinic management.
Then, on top of that, the school has a huge and efficient system of patient advocates, new patient screening coordinator, chief coordinator, each clinic coordinator (heroes clinic, OMFS clinic, special care clinic, etc) and their goal is to have the whole school running smoothly from faculties, students, labs, clinics, staff, etc.
To achieve the maximum efficiency here at the school, we have 2 coordinator meetings, 2 advocate meetings, 2 team meetings and 1 practice meeting per semester (except summer semester – they have only 1 each because the semester is shorter). For coordinator meetings, we will have basically 1hr with the coordinator to go through how our patient pool looks like, any patient that we have trouble to deal with or to contact, how the pool helps with our requirements for graduation, and if we need to have more patient for a specific need. Then, if we do need more patients with crowns, dentures, restorations etc she will send email to other coordinator such as new patient screening clinic coordinator to find us more patients. Or she may help us to call the patient that we couldn’t contact for a while. Final step is to gather all these information to forward to our advocate for the next meeting with them.
At coordinator meeting, we will discuss with the advocate for about 1 – 1.5hr about those info we got from the coordinator meeting – which one we should prioritize and which one we can wait and see. I still remember after my last meeting, my advocate literally “dragged” me around the school with her to find some important persons to give me more patients with crowns. How awesome is that! That’s the reason why the school assign 1 faculty to take care of 10/20 students only because there is so much to do.
At team meeting, the whole team (except 20 students from DS1) will gather twice a semester to discuss about what happened, is happening or will happen in the clinic. This morning we were discussing about new periodontal classification, new changing in our program call Axium, reinforced our understanding about insurance, finance, prescription etc. Every meeting will have different content because it is based on what’s really going on in clinic. For example, if the school noticed that there was lots of trouble recently in sending lab order, they will guide us on how to send a lab order in next meeting. These meetings are very important that Dr.Johnson – our Associate Dean of Clinics and Professional Practice always takes his time to be there, first to answer any question, and second to remind us of our privilege and responsibility to be a student at the school and that we should take advantage of every minute we are students here.
At practice meeting, it will be among us team C ISP2 again with our advocate and coordinator. Each time my advocate will email the whole team asking which topic we want to know more about and she will find a faculty to talk to us. Last meeting we were so worried about the board exam so she invited a faculty familiar with the board thingy to discuss with us – what to expect, what to avoid, what to do to have a smooth exam, etc. The meeting before that we had a field trip to one of the labs school is working with to understand more about lab procedures. At the meeting before before that we were talking to a prosthodontist about rotational path RPD.
One time my advocate told us how lucky we all are to have this system because when she was a student at her dental school, one advocate was in charge of 50 students or more and she had only 10 min discussing with hers in a whole year, not even a semester. CU really cares for their students. As long as we keep working hard but smart, and voicing out when needing some help, they will do their best to support us. I know I am very lucky to be at CUDenver, and the more I know about my school, the prouder I am.
This post is dedicated to all the awesome people at CUDenver. I love you all!
White coat ceremony for ISP1 and DS2 at CU