Bachelor of Dental Surgery

The six-year Bachelor of Dental Surgery Program at Riyadh Elm University, Formerly Riyadh Colleges of Dentistry and Pharmacy is a professional dentistry program where students are involved with clinical procedures from the outset of the program, with an emphasis on the recognition and prevention of oral diseases.

The Department of Dentistry aims towards presenting a program that is stimulating and enjoyable and one that develops skills and attitudes to continue learning after graduation; in other words to become life-long learners.

The curriculum enjoys a balance of problem-based, self-directed, traditional and hands-on learning approaches with early exposure of students to clinical dental practice. The curriculum provides students with a broad dental education that encourages continual professional development and produces graduates that are well-rounded, thinking and mature clinicians.

In today’s exciting and challenging era for dentistry, much of dental disease can be prevented. Although there is now a wide array of techniques to alleviate pain and treat dental disease, there is still that need for further improvements and better ways to prevent and treat these diseases. With this also comes the need to develop new teaching methods for the dental student of today.

At RCDP, we are trying to meet these challenges with undergraduate and postgraduate courses designed to provide both the scientific background and the practical skills needed to make the best use of new materials and put into practice the most up-to-date advances in dentistry. It is RCDP’s goal to provide our dental students with the basic understanding of oral diseases and the skills for applied aspects of their prevention and treatment in order to prepare them to practice dentistry in the 21st Century.

The curriculum is a competency based curriculum. It has been designed and modified over the years to reflect the changing needs of the dental profession and public. The school’s primary mission is patient centered. Our goal is to develop dental practitioners who are able to utilize the basic principles of human biology and human behavior in conjunction with their technical skills in diagnosing, treating, and preventing oral disease. The RCDP graduate should be able to integrate knowledge across disciplines and perform procedures with patient well-being in mind. They should understand the importance of life-long learning to continually improve their knowledge and skill base.

The B.D.S. program, which extends over a six- year period, consists of a series of:

• Didactic (lecture and seminar),
• Patient simulation (patient simulation clinic, introductory clinical experience, and workshop), and
• Clinical (group practice, rotations and Community Service Learning Internship) experiences. These are designed and sequenced to result in the logical development of concepts and skills from simple to advanced procedures. Included in the curriculum is an awareness of research methodology and the search techniques to support Evidence-Based Dentistry. Also included is a sense of community responsibility so that all patients can access needed care.