Survey of special patient care programs at U.S. and Canadian dental schools.

This article describes the results of a survey of U.S. and Canadian dental schools regarding the delivery of dental care to special needs patients. The purposes of the fifteen-item survey were to identify the percentage of dental schools that operate special patient care (SPC) clinics, gain information as to how care is being provided in those clinics, and identify how this patient population is managed in institutions without designated SPC clinics. Forty percent of the respondent institutions had designated SPC clinics. Institutions without SPC clinics tend to mainstream these patients into their predoctoral clinics or refer them to residency programs such as GPR or pediatric programs within their university.