PubMed HealthSearch

Biomedical subjects

P Batchelor

Publications and source records attributed to P Batchelor.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

Issues concerning the development of a competency-based assessment system for dentistry.

The issue of standards of competence and assessment is central to professions. For the dental profession there have been suggestions that a change from overall competence to specific fields of competence would be a more suitable mechanism to assess whether an individual was competent. This paper examines the implications of such proposed changes and highlights several key issues, answers to which need to be provided prior to adopting new proposals. Failure to do so may well provide additional problems without addressing shortcomings in the present system.

Accreditation

Health through oral health; guidelines for planning and monitoring for oral health care: a critical comment on the WHO model.

Recently a joint working group of WHO/FDI published guidelines for planning and monitoring oral health care. In the report a model for calculations of future need for dental manpower was introduced as an effective planning tool. An analysis of whether the WHO model is appropriate to calculate the future need for manpower planning was carried out. It appears that the model has serious methodological shortcomings. The model expects the user to know the future oral care needs concerning preventive, special group, surgical, orthodontic, and periodontal care. In calculating future needs for restorative and prosthetic care, the model restricts itself to looking back in time and roughly calculating what has happened in the past, assuming this will happen again.

Adolescent

NGF receptor reexpression and NGF-mediated cholinergic neuronal hypertrophy in the damaged adult neostriatum.

Adult cholinergic interneurons of the neostriatum are not immunoreactive for monoclonal antibody to NGF receptor, whereas the developing neostriatum is immunoreactive for this same antibody. Chronic NGF infusion into the adult neostriatum resulted in reexpression of the NGF receptor such that many cholinergic interneurons became immunoreactive for NGF receptor. NGF infusion dramatically increased the size and choline acetyltransferase immunoreactivity of these same cholinergic neurons. Additionally, in situ hybridization demonstrated an increase in the number of cells expressing NGF receptor mRNA in the NGF-infused striatum. These findings indicate that central cholinergic neurons which lose their NGF receptors during postnatal development will resume their NGF responsiveness when the tissue is damaged. Such a damage-induced mechanism may act to enhance the action of trophic factors, including NGF, released at the site of injury and enhance the responsiveness of damaged CNS neurons to exogenously administered trophic factors.

Aging