Tips and Tidbits: ADA CE Course Explains New Treatment Model for Children

ADA CE Course Explains New Treatment Model for Children

The ADA CE Online website is offering a new interactive continuing education course, “Highchair Dental Care: A Revolutionary Practice Model for Infants and Toddlers,” that teaches dental professionals an alternate way to treat children beginning as early as eight months of age, while at the same time providing oral health, dental, and diet education for parents and caregivers.

The presenter is pediatric dentist, Dr. Winifred J. Booker, president-elect of the Maryland State Dental Association and past president of the Society of American Indian Dentists and the Maryland Dental Society, a local component of the National Dental Association.

In 2014, Booker developed Highchair Dental Care and has incorporated it as the way in which she offers treatment and caregiver guidance for 1- and 2-year-old patients.

One of the insights that Dr. Booker offers is the utilization of a familiar household device that is largely missing from dental settings: the highchair. “The highchair provides the safety and security needed to conduct the proper infant oral exam,” Dr. Booker said. “It affords the infant their first dental examination in a conducive atmosphere that is familiar to them, which a traditional dental chair cannot. Strategies that engage a child's natural inclination to open their mouth to laugh or eat is a part of the course instruction.”

She continued, “By placing the baby in a highchair, they are comfortable and usually willing to open wide for their first oral examination, dental cleaning, and/or fluoride application. This practice model is a childfriendly approach to patient care that works well with most infants.”

The member price for this course is $279 (non-members pay $329). Full details of this and other ADA CE offerings are available at ADA.org/education/continuing-education.