Developing and redefining the clinical standards for modern dental hygiene care is an area that is crucial to advancing our profession. Technological and scientific advances have made vast changes in the way dental hygienists treat their patients. The last set of dental hygiene standards of practice were developed in 1985. Since then, there has been no update to allow dental hygienists to benchmark how they treat patients against a comprehensive standard of care.
In 2003, the ADHA Board of Trustees appointed a task force to develop a new clinical practice guideline for dental hygiene. The task force has made considerable progress since that time, and the preliminary guideline will be featured during the upcoming ADHA Annual Session in Orlando. Drafting a framework for the development of a clinical practice guideline required the task force to use the dental hygiene process of care, existing accreditation standards, and the Joint Commission on National Dental Examination's National Dental Hygiene Examination to guide them.
The resulting draft guideline focuses on two key goals:
• Defining what the public can expect of dental hygienists
• Allowing practitioners to substantiate and validate practice
To facilitate discussion during the Association Activities Forum at the Annual Session when the task force chair will present the draft guideline, ADHA requests your review and seeks your feedback. Simply review the Draft CPG and provide your comments on the feedback form. You may type your comments directly into the electronic document and select the "save as" button to save it to your computer and return to ADHA via electronic mail. Alternatively, you may fax or mail the completed form to ADHA. Please return the completed feedback form by Aug. 1, 2006 to:
Colleen Schmidt, RDH, MS, Director of Education
Colleen Schmidt or by fax at (312) 467-1806
Or mail to:
ADHA
Colleen Schmidt, RDH, MS, Director of Education
444 N. Michigan Avenue, Suite 3400
Chicago, IL 60611
Source: ADHA Web site, accessed June 26, 2006.
