Evaluating the Dental Pipeline Program: Recruiting Minorities and Promoting Community-Based Dental Education, 2003-2007 [United States]

The Pipeline, Profession, and Practice: Community-Based Dental Education (Dental Pipeline) program was a national initiative created by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) in 2001 to address the critical shortage of oral health care for underserved and disadvantaged populations in the United States. By 2003, RWJF selected 11 dental schools to receive Dental Pipeline funding for 5 years through a competitive application process, and The California Endowment (TCE) joined the program in July 2003, funding 4 additional dental schools in California. The initiative focused on recruitment and retention of underrepresented minority dental students, curriculum revisions to stress community-based dental education (CBDE), and increased extramural clinical rotations for students in the community, with the expectation that these changes in dental education would lead to improved access for underserved populations. The Dental Pipeline program sought not only to increase underrepresented minority recruitment but also to build cultural competence for all dental students so that they are better prepared to treat a diverse group of patients. Based in the Department of Health Services at the UCLA School of Public Health, the National Evaluation Team (NET) was chosen by the foundations to be the national evaluator of the Pipeline program. The NET employed a multidisciplinary team using qualitative and quantitative methods and multiple data sources to conduct a comprehensive 5-year evaluation. This ICPSR study contains data from five of the evaluation's data collection efforts: two faculty surveys, a survey of deans, curriculum checklists, clinical information system, and site-visit interviews.

Conducted at two time points during the Pipeline program implementation, the faculty surveys interviewed faculty members in the Dental Pipeline schools about their perceptions of extramural clinical rotations; competence of senior students; support for and effectiveness of recruitment programs intended to increase the number of underrepresented minority and low-income (URM/LI) dental students; impact of diversity on education experience; barriers to sustainability of the extramural programs, cultural competency dental education curricula, and URM/LI recruitment; and barriers for graduating seniors to practice in settings that provide care to underserved populations.

The survey of deans from Pipeline schools inquired about the importance of public policy issues related to dental education and expanding access to oral health care, level of activity and effectiveness of efforts to influence goals, and factors that facilitate or serve as barriers to influencing policy development.

The purpose of the curriculum checklists was to document the Pipeline schools' efforts to develop/revise their CBDE curricula and to characterize the key parameters of all their CBDE courses.

The clinical information system collected information about the Pipeline schools' predoctoral clinical rotations for each of the five academic years covered by the evaluation: total number of days in core community rotations, number of days in extramural rotations by type of extramural site (e.g., urban/rural, Federally Qualified Health Center, community health center, Veterans Administration hospital/clinic, Indian Health Service, and public/parochial school), and average distance of extramural facilities from school.

Multiple rounds of qualitative site visit interview data were collected from different stakeholder groups at the Pipeline schools: faculty, administrators, community representatives, first year students, and fourth year students. The site visit interviews, which were taped and transcribed, were conducted for several reasons: to describe Pipeline program components including baseline status, program structures, and implementation processes; to validate and clarify information gathered from other data sources; to collect information not available from other data sources; and to identify evidence-based best practices in the schools. Altogether, there are 522 discrete transcripts which ICPSR bundled in a single ZIP archive.