Bologna Declaration was the first important document to set a goal for equal quality dental care in all EU countries for every dental patient. It will serve the European Unification, the free movement of dental healthcare professionals as well as the safety of the patients.

The first step has been the development and implementation of a profile of the European dentist with a list of competencies. It has been achieved with the help of EU funded DentED programs and now widely accepted by the vast majority of European dental schools.

Harmonization of Continuous professional development (CPD) for graduate dentists is the next step towards assuring EU citizens that dental practitioners providing their care maintain their knowledge and skills via ongoing education, underpinning their clinical practice. Therefore the Association for Dental Education in Europe (ADEE) initiated a new two year European project entitled “Harmonization and standardization of European dental Schools programs of continuing professional development for graduate dentists”.

This project   which started in October 2010 and will end in September 2012 is co funded by EU and executed under the Lifelong learning programme, Erasmus subprogramme, “Modernization of higher education”. There are six partner institutions in this project: Cardiff University Dental School (the lead and main coordinator), ACTA, Helsinki University dental school, Athens University School of Dentistry, Riga Stradins University and ADEE.

Continuous Professional development (CPD) is an essential tool for graduate dentists to develop themselves professionally and maintain an improve their knowledge and skills throughout their professional carrier. However CPD available across Europe is very variable and provided by a range of bodies including dental schools, professional associations, public sector and industry, not all are subject to quality management. This project aims to identify agreed essential CPD requirements of an EU graduate dentist and provide guidelines for the management and delivery of high quality CPD by European dental schools.

The main activities of this project are:

• Producing an inventory of existing programs and providers by literature and internet search
• Agreeing essential components and core CPD topics by survey and consensus methods
• Development of exemplar teaching module on a core CPD topic by employing modern technological advances in pedagogy.
  

The main outputs of the project will be:

• Inventory of existing CPD programs and providers; agreement on core topics; identification of best practice
• Guidelines for dental schools on the organization, quality management and assurance of CPD programs
• Guidelines for delivery of competence-based CPD modules.