2017 was a productive year for ADEA—it’s difficult to determine what to highlight, but here’s a try:
Our hard work over the past decade to bring dentistry into the interprofessional health care team continued to bear fruit. As Past President and now Board Chair of the Interprofessional Education Collaborative (IPEC), I am pleased to report that in 2017, the number of IPEC members has risen from 6 to 20 organizations in less than a decade. ADEA also continued a deep engagement in the Federation of Associations of Schools of the Health Professions to routinely strategize with key “sister organizations” who face many of the same challenges as academic dentistry, including the diversity of our professions.
ADEA’s leadership and professional development programs showed sustained strong attendance and positive evaluations. We hired new staff, and promoted existing staff, to focus on developing and enhancing our professional development offerings for you in innovative ways. Notably, we launched the re-envisioned ADEA Commission on Change and Innovation in Dental Education 2.0 to provide future-ready tools and resources that promote reflective, critical and collaborative thinking.
ADEA is also on the rise globally. Our highly successful joint meeting last May in London with the Association for Dental Education in Europe was attended by 300 people from nearly 50 countries, and led to planning for a follow-on meeting in 2019 in Brescia, Italy, to be held alongside our important and timely Sixth ADEA International Women’s Leadership Conference. In addition, we are working more closely with the Canadian Faculties of Dentistry to fully appreciate and represent the entire North American dental education community.
Also of note are our strong advocacy presence on Capitol Hill and in state legislatures, addressing topics vital to dental educators; significant growth in ADEA Chapters, a vital pipeline for future faculty; and our re-envisioning of the ADEAGies Foundation®.
Across ADEA, we operate against a central, unifying theme: oral health must be right where it belongs, central to heath care and to health care policy. These ADEA highlights only scratch the surface of all that happened last year—please review our full 2017 Annual Report to learn more about “the best of ADEA.”