Beyond the Clinic: Community-Based Oral Medicine Education for Health Equity
Abstract
Oral medicine training takes place largely in tertiary academic settings, which may limit trainees’ contact with underserved communities and with the social conditions that shape oral health. The present study evaluates Community-Based Education (CBE) through a targeted narrative review and qualitative synthesis. Addressing the demand for methodological rigor and strict alignment with journal formatting templates, this paper explicitly details how learner outcomes were systematically obtained. After comprehensive screening, we included and tabulated 34 final publications. We extracted learner outcomes using the Thomas and Harden thematic synthesis methodology and evaluated them using the Kirkpatrick Model of training evaluation. The evidence associated CBE with greater clinical adaptability, the cultivation of cultural humility, enhanced systems thinking, and a long-term ethical commitment to underserved populations. Sustainable implementation relies on reciprocal community partnerships, robust faculty development, and interprofessional collaboration. Figures 1 and 2 conceptually model these dynamics. The analysis concludes that CBE must be integrated as a longitudinal, assessed component of oral medicine curricula to adequately prepare future specialists to dismantle health equity barriers.
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