Dental Materials and Their Selection – Virtual Patient (VP) Software from a Student Perspective

Virtual-patient (VP) software is an innovative educational tool which provides a safe environment in which students and interns can acquire clinical skills before engaging in real patient cases. Virtual patients allow the study of different scenarios regardless of the teaching staff availability, student location or, more important in dentistry, accessibility to patient, dental materials and different technologies. Considering the high standards of nowadays dentistry and, unfortunately, the limited possibilities in university clinics, the young doctors might find themselves in front of an overwhelming dilemma concerning material selection, appropriate technique and technology. The aim was to assess the qualitative general impact of VPs on dentistry students and the qualitative impact of two virtual clinical cases in particular, focusing on the selection of dental materials and on the suitable technology. 73 students participated in this study. The study comprised 5 stages: answer to an initial questionnaire regarding the students’ previous experience with VP software and their expectations related to the VP characteristics; incorporate the results of the initial questionnaire into building the two mentioned virtual cases; use built VPs in student training; answer to a final questionnaire recording the student feed-back to the VPs used; corroborate results from the two questionnaires to establish relevant qualitative features for VPs in dentistry. The results of the study are an important feed-back tool helping in developing and refining VPs with a high degree of acceptance, maximizing the educational efficiency of this learning method. Some of the most desired characteristics were: multimedia content, feed-back for good and bad decisions, low to medium degree of complexity, high coverage of course subjects. The use of VPs offers the chance of working with a broad range of dental materials (in a simulated mode) which is not normally possible in a real practice constrained by financial restrictions.