Perception of students and faculty toward a new curriculum based on SPICES model for dental interns

Dental curriculum in India needs to focus on clinical training of the students in workplace. With the rise of outcome-based education, competency-oriented systematic training with a multidimensional evaluation happens to be the need of the hour. The institutions and regulatory bodies should shift the focus of examination-oriented preparation of students to clinical-oriented training and evaluation.[1] Dr. RM Harden way back in 1984 has identified the strategies to impart training in workplace and equip the students with necessary skills to be a good decision maker and an effective clinician.[2] He has differentiated traditional approach to his approach by recommending a necessary shift needed from teacher centeredness to student centeredness, discipline based to integrated, information gathering to problem-solving, hospital based to community based, standard to elective, and opportunistic to systematic. In the literature, we see lot of deliberations on such strategies.[3-6] However, in the Indian scenario, we find that traditional system of education is still in practice. Owing to the economic situation, students may not have an exposure of rendering a better treatment plan which may be expensive. The student may choose a compromised plan with the limitations. Some institutions have implemented comprehensive clinical training of students. SPICES guidelines as proposed by Dr. RM Harden was used in the construction of curriculum for dental interns in an institution in India to evaluate the outcomes by the primary investigator. The time of intervention was from the year 2017 to 2018 for the regular and supplementary batches. O R I G I N A L A R T I C L E