Leadership training for oral health professionals: a call to action.

With dramatic changes in the scope and mode of delivering oral health care on the horizon, a strategic approach to addressing the emerging opportunities and challenges is required. Such an approach will demand new and sustained initiatives to develop leaders with the skills, knowledge, and passion to guide oral health care into the future. The purpose of this position paper is to define the need for leadership training programs for dental and dental hygiene students to become future leaders. Whether these oral health professionals become leaders within a solo or group practice or at the local or national level of their profession, they must be given the mindset and tools to lead. This position paper will describe goals for leadership training and give examples of some programs that currently exist in dental education and other professional settings as the background for a call to action for dental education to provide leadership training opportunities for its students.