Purpose: Oral health encompasses much more than cleaning, drilling, filling, and straightening teeth.
Students, however, are not always exposed to the range of career possibilities that exist in our field. Allied
professionals like ‘technologists,’ ‘researchers,’ ‘psychologists,’ ‘public health advocates,’ and beyond,
are indispensable in improving the public’s oral health but their professional labels do not intuit how they
participate and leverage their skills to make an impact. To assist students in exploring careers they may
never have come across, we created Problem-Based Career Exploration. This paradigm defines an
individual’s work according to the problem it addresses, and uses affiliation networks to showcase how
people from various disciplines and professions unite to address similar problems. The purpose of this
study was to determine if oral health professionals could frame their work as a problem. With this
understanding, a portal can be created to showcase people (and their career paths) whose defined problem
they work to address leads to improved oral health. This will allow us to expose students and the public to
the problems that need their creativity, energy and insight.
Methods: IRB approval was achieved and a consent form was provided to each participant. Oral health
professionals across disciplines, professions, institutions and sectors were recruited into the study using a
snowball sampling approach. A semi-structured interview guide, “The Professional Pathways Interview”
was used to conduct the individual interviews. Each participant was asked to respond to twenty-one
questions about their work, including defining their work according to a problem it addressed, the
importance of that problem, the skills required to address it, the people with whom they collaborate, and
the path that led them to where they are now. Each interview was recorded using a digital recording
device. The mp3 files were cut into tracks, transcribed, and checked for accuracy.
Conclusion: A racially diverse group of 23 oral health professionals (13 women, 12 men) participated.
All participants were able to define their work according to a problem it addressed. The following are
example problem statements elicited from the interviews:
Example 1
: a primary care pediatrician who studied medicine, and public health, who works on the
problem of “integrating oral health into the delivery of pediatric primary care services.”
Example 2
: a dental hygienist who studied elementary education and psychology who addresses the
problem of “access to oral health care for children in Massachusetts.”
Example 3
: a dentist who studied business, public health, and oncology who addresses the problem of
“the discrepancy between medical and dental coverage for patients with cancer experience.”
Example 4
: a clinical psychologist who studied biology, psychology, and chemistry who addresses the
problem of “dental pain sensitivity and fear of the dentist.”
Oral health professionals successfully frame their work as a problem it addresses. This approach adds
granularity, depth, and context to the work of oral health professionals across disciplines and professions.
This paradigm could aid students in imagining a wider range of pathways through which to leverage their
skills, knowledge, and training to improve oral health.