Award-winning Goodacre on spirituality, service
Loma Linda University joined such institutions as Harvard and New York University earlier this year during an award ceremony for dental schools.
Since 2000, school officials have worked to provide interactive teaching aids that are now used in dental schools nationwide. The American Dental Education Association recognized the Loma Linda University School of Dentistry’s dean, Dr. Charles Goodacre, with one of eight inaugural Gies awards; his for Outstanding Innovation as a dental educator.
The Southern California Seventh-day Adventist institution has now graduated more than 6,000 dentists since its launch in 1953. One hundred percent of enrolled students are currently involved in community service as part of the school’s service learning.
The school operates mission dental clinics worldwide and school officials hope more dentists will volunteer to serve, not just to help people but to be financially successful and witness for their faith. School leaders say they appreciate the support of the church and recognition of the importance of dentistry to the church’s mission and community health.
Goodacre, 61, whose hobbies include woodcarving and model trains, recently met with Adventist News Network for an interview in his 5th floor office, which overlooks campus and the San Bernardino Valley. He shared his vision for the school, how it’s different from others and its role in the world church’s mission. Excerpts follow:
Adventist News Network: Congratulations on the Gies award. Why did you win it?
Dr. Charles Goodacre: Thank you. We’ve developed electronic education aids at a higher level than other schools. ... We had 11,000 requests last year for copies of one of our DVD programs. It’s used by almost every school in North America. I think that’s a tribute to our school of dentistry.
ANN: About 70 percent of your students choose a short term mission trip overseas as a community service project. How important are these mission trips to the school’s objectives?
Goodacre: Well, one of the key reasons we’re here is to develop students who have more than just technical skills. When we talk to alumni and ask them what the most life-changing events that happened to them when they were students, they say it was their involvement in international activities. And while we do some great things for the people where we go, great things have happened to the students that go.
ANN: Why do you require the class, “Spirituality of the church health professional?”
Goodacre: We’re trying to build the whole continuum of spiritual involvement and you start off the first year reinforcing the Adventist health principles. We’ve got a course called “Christian dentist in the community” to emphasize the importance of their involvement. You hope they sustain this involvement and activity when they leave. Of course, many of them do. A true professional is more than just a technician.
ANN: Your students do rotations through the university’s medical and dental clinic that treats HIV/AIDS patients. What kinds of precautions does a dentist have to take when working with a patient who has HIV/AIDS?
Goodacre: The special precautions are the universal precautions we use with all patients. We don’t worry about who we work on.
ANN: Then why have a separate facility for those patients?
Goodacre: They feel most comfortable when they’re in an environment where people are comfortable treating them. Once they own up to having HIV/AIDS in their medical history a lot of people have convenient reasons why they can’t [treat them]. When you talk to those people as our students are required to do and find out, What’s it like to have HIV and seek healthcare? How are you treated? What you find out is very interesting.
ANN: What are your future goals?
Goodacre: The biggest plan right now is looking into building a new school. We’ve exhausted our existing facilities in that we have no growth potential. We’re going through a lean process, which means trying to refine our processes to make them as efficient as possible. You shouldn’t plan for space using existing systems if some of those systems are a little flawed. We have some flawed systems like any organization.
ANN: What does this school do well?
Goodacre: We provide a great education for these students. They get an incredible clinical experience here in a spiritual environment. And that’s where you can openly incorporate spiritual values into your curriculum. There’s Loma Linda and Creighton University in Nebraska and those are the only two dental schools that do that. I taught for 23 years at Indiana University where you didn’t do those things in class—it was considered inappropriate. Here it’s not.
ANN: What are some of the challenges facing the school right now?
Goodacre: Well it’s resources, no question. People and resources are what challenge most entities.
ANN: What would you do with more people and resources?
Goodacre: Well you could certainly do a lot more of the positive things in the community and the outreach than what we can do now. No question. We have between 100,000 and 120,000 patient visits per year in the dental school. Many of those are coming here because we provide care at a lower cost. They wouldn’t receive care otherwise. Last year, it was about 9,000 people we provided care for outside of the school for free—about 4,000 here locally and 5,000 internationally.
ANN: What are some of the school’s weaknesses?
Goodacre: We have incredible strengths in the research area, but it’s in certain areas. We don’t have as broad and extensive research program as some others. The director of our center for research, Dr. Yiming Li, he’s one of six dentists on the FDA panel that approve new products for dentistry. He’s a world leader in bio-compatibility and toxicology. Dr. Torabinejad is a world leader in endodontics. And it’s always a challenge to find faculty who will work for what we can pay them. It’s relatively modest compared to private practice. And to find Adventists who are qualified. It takes more than 500 people counting part-time instructors to run this school.
ANN: Where would you say the dental school fits into the world church’s mission?
Goodacre: Well, dental care has allowed the Adventist Church to offer health care services in parts of the world where there is no other activity. I think we have a presence in some places because of dentistry. We have no idea what that leads to in the future in countries where [the church] can’t overtly have activities. Having dentistry has been financially beneficial to a lot of areas of the world. The school operates 76 mission dental clinics. We manage those for the church. We have a lot of faculty who travel to try to keep these clinics open and running.
ANN: What’s more important: brushing or flossing?
Goodacre: Both are important, but brushing—if a person can only do one of the two—is preferred.
