Hospital dentists seeking to attend the ATLS® course: like pulling teeth?

Abstract

The Advanced Trauma Life Support® (ATLS®) course was first run in the US in 1978 and in the decades since, it has been disseminated and taught all over the world. In the UK, it has become an integral component of surgical training for many specialties including oral and maxillofacial surgery (OMFS), and it is considered an extremely useful adjunct to clinical practice. OMFS requires independent practitioners to be qualified in both medicine and dentistry. The training pathway has multiple entry routes, with some trainees first qualifying in medicine before doing dentistry and vice versa. While the ATLS® steering group has expanded the eligibility criteria to include many types of advanced practitioners, there remain some caveats to the inclusion of hospital dentists. The default position is that they are instead subject to individual review by the chair of the ATLS® steering group if they wish to apply for the ATLS® course. This inevitably brings their competence into question even though they often routinely work with dental or OMFS trauma. This paper highlights a possible perception among some hospital dentists of ineligibility to participate and perceived inequity in accessing the course. Furthermore, there is a mild but nevertheless apparent discrepancy between wording from the ATLS® steering group and guidance from the British Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons, and the General Dental Council. In order to remedy these issues, it is proposed that there should be joint or concordant, explicit, published guidance from these institutions regarding the participation of non-medically trained OMFS trainees and other hospital dentists on the ATLS® course.