Delivering effective dental education during clinical placements: the JCU experience

Sometimes referred to as outreach training, clinical placements in dental education offer unique opportunities for dental students to apply their theoretical knowledge and gain significant experience of patient care in a real-world clinical situation outside the traditional dental school teaching environment. In this paper, we review the approach taken by James Cook University's dentistry programme in delivering and quality assuring substantive, 34-week-long final-year clinical placements throughout rural and regional Australia.