CONSCIOUS SEDATION: BUILDING A COMPETENCE IN THE SPANISH DEGREE OF DENTISTRY

Introduction. During the 2009-2010 academic year, Spanish universities began to offer the new curriculum in Dentistry. For the first time, in an effort to adapt to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), they included conscious sedation (CS) as a specific competence in disciplinary and professional training. However, our country's legislation suggests a level of training for this competency that does not enable Spanish dentists to apply sedation techniques after graduating. With the increment in the interest in recent years of this anaesthetic technique, a series of questions were raised: 1 Do undergraduate students in Dentistry consider it necessary to introduce formal training in CS in their curriculum? 2 What do the professionals think about it? 3 What nature do students and professionals consider that this training should have? Methodology. To answer these questions, we designed a field study focused on students in grades 2 to 5 in our Faculty during the academic year of 2015-2016, as well as professionals in various fields. Results. The overwhelming majority of professionals and students agreed on the need to include training in conscious sedation in the curriculum of the Degree in Dentistry that allows our students to use it after graduation. Conclusions. The latest guidelines from the Association for Dental Education in Europe (ADEE_2017) allow Dental Schools to adapt their curricula to the needs of society. Based on this, our Faculty of Dentistry has designed and implemented the training in this anaesthetic technique into the Degree curriculum so that, as the motto of the ADEE Annual Meeting 2019 (Berlin, Germany21st - 23rd August 2019) states, we are "Equipping our students to be dentists of the future".