Teaching posterior composite resin restorations in the United Kingdom and Ireland: consensus views of teachers.

Posterior composite resin restorations are an established feature of contemporary dental practice and all new dental graduates should be competent in providing such treatments for their patients. Surveys of educational curricula in this area in the United Kingdom and Ireland, as well as North America, have demonstrated variations both within and between dental schools. Such inconsistency does not help new dental school graduates, and may lead to confusion. At the British Association of Teachers of Conservative Dentistry Annual Conference held in Birmingham in September 2005, a session was devoted to the development of guidelines for dental schools on teaching posterior composite resin restorations to dental undergraduates. The theme of the conference concerned the teaching implications for changing from amalgam to composite. Two of the principal speakers at the meeting (Joost Roeters and Niek Opdam) were from the dental school at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands. This school was the first in Europe to discontinue the use of dental amalgam in its undergraduate curriculum over a decade ago. This paper reports the consensus views of those present on guidelines for teaching posterior composite resin restorations to dental undergraduate students.