Continuing Professional Development (CPD) for the Dental Profession in Australia: An Approach and Its Implication

In this thesis, I argue that in order to keep up to date with knowledge, technology and clinical procedures, professional practitioners need to continue to learn throughout life and build on their previous knowledge and experience. To this end, I have taken a range of responses from a sample of practising dentists in regional Australia. This study's original contribution to the field of professional education is a newly gained understanding of attitudes of practising dentists to Continuing Professional Development (CPD), including more specifically these dentists' attitudes towards CPD as a learning experience, and the incentives for and barriers to their engagement in this learning.;In addition, I have explored two related areas within the sample group against the background variables of sex, age of practitioner and type of practice. The first explored area was the range of associations between learning and incentives and barriers, and attitudes to the usefulness of, and extent of engagement in CPD. The second area related to the attitudes to mentoring, updating components of dental practice and accreditation of CPD. I question if these attitudes are possible predictors of effective CPD with this hypothesis: Those who prefer to learn through social interaction and/or collaboration with others are more likely to have a positive attitude to engagement in Continuing Professional Development (CPD)..;I begin with an extensive review of the literature on the concepts of professions and professionalism. I follow with a review of existing research of CPD as professional learning throughout a lifetime of practice, alongside a review of existing research of professional learning through interaction and/or collaboration with others.;The study's data on attitudes and behaviours to CPD were gathered through a self-managed questionnaire sent to a population of registered dentists in the ACT and surrounding regions. 325 practising dentists were invited to participate with a response rate of 44 percent. The results of the survey showed the most useful activities for CPD were hands-on workshops, which were effective for updating clinical and procedure skills; and lectures, which were effective for updating knowledge. Mentoring was strongly supported by the whole profession with older dentists prepared to act as mentors and younger dentists willing to be mentored. The most significant incentives to engage in CPD were course content, quality of presenter and relevance to practice..;There were significant differences in attitudes to CPD between males and females and older and younger age groups. For example, females generally preferred more social learning environments than males. Costs related to CPD were more of a discouraging factor for younger dentists and motivational factors related to intellectual curiosity were strongest in younger males but modify with age such that older females were more self-motivated than other groups. Overall, differences in attitudes between specialists and general practitioners were small, except for intellectual curiosity and willingness to act as mentors where specialists dominated.;The results and implications of this study will be valuable to any future offering of CPD to professionals in Australia. It has built upon previous research by offering a new framework for effective CPD for all professions. This new CPD framework aligns course content with CPD activities that have been demonstrated as useful and which have been reported as actually engaged in, with the learning characteristics of the target demographics. The CPD framework has been developed within the Australian context and the rapidly changing demographics of Australian dental practice.