An excellent implant course is designed to cater for a specific skillset and has clear goals about what participants will learn and achieve through it.

Implant dentistry is commonly separated into straightforward, advanced and complex procedures and each individual course should address one of those areas of teaching and not try to appeal to all. It’s inappropriate to teach complex procedures to people who have not yet mastered straightforward implant procedures.

In an ideal world, implant education would be full-time for three years in a hospital environment providing surgical and restorative procedures and keeping a log book. But for General Dental Practitioners wishing to enhance their skills, this is not feasible and a more user-friendly modular approach to practical and academic learning is more realistic.

Here are some features of an excellent dental implant course:

• Pitches to specific ability levels:  straightforward, advanced and complex.

• Includes a range of speakers with a breadth of experience to allow individual delegates to gain as much information as possible.

• Allows open and honest discourse, both at the course itself and between modules in an online platform where delegates can discuss (in a non-threatening way) cases of their own and individual issues to allow the group to learn.

• Provides practical implant experience, both on models but more importantly on patients and it will encourage delegates to source, assess and plan their own patients in their own practice.

• Gives the opportunity for delegates to enter into a mentoring arrangement which will enhance their skills further on completion of the course and it will identify where delegate’s shortfalls and shortcomings are and assist them to allow them to improve.

• Uses a format which provides one or two days per month of teaching, together with inter-module discussion and education and practical arrangements is the ideal option for starting out in straightforward implant dentistry for young practitioners.

More advanced and complex course would come later in the pathway towards fifty implants placed per year and MScs to deepen the knowledge and understand research at a later stage.