The role of community engaged dental education in producing socially accountable graduates in the context of the General Dental Council's Safe Practitioner Framework

The General Dental Council's Safe Practitioner Framework sets out the required behaviours and learning outcomes for UK graduates across four domains, and social accountability is a new competency in the domain of professionalism. Community engagement is a type of community-based education, which has been advocated as a promising pedagogical approach to help institutions produce socially accountable graduates. It is conceptualised as a form of experiential education which uses community exposure educational programmes or activities (i.e., students are exposed to the population/community of interest usually in a non-clinical setting) to highlight and address community health care needs. Community engaged education can help students appreciate the role of the social determinants of health in shaping oral health; provide opportunities to improve empathy, cultural competence and sensitivity; improve interpersonal skills and communication; and may open the eyes of new graduates into the importance of social justice and health equity in their future professional practice. This paper will describe the key terms involved in social accountability and will discuss some of the benefits of community engaged education in the context of the Safe Practitioner Framework reflecting on the evidence from the international healthcare literature.