I am currently a resident at UCLA's AEGD program in Venice. There are 6 residents total in our program and we work in a community clinic that also has 14 predoc chairs and 4 pedo chairs. I would highly recommend this program if you're planning on staying in general practice.
Since our program is off-site from the main UCLA campus in Westwood, we keep almost all our procedures in-house with the exception of Ortho and difficult Endo cases (dilacerated or highly calcified canals). This allows you to try your hand at a lot of procedures that you might have otherwise referred out, and possibly perform them in private practice. In terms of coverage by specialists, we have a Periodontist that comes for a full day once a week, in which you can schedule osseous surgeries, implant placements, bone grafting, surgical exts, and CT grafts; an Endodontist that is there one half-day a week; an Implantologist that there is there 2 half-days a month; and an Oral Surgeon, who is there one half-day a month, in which you can schedule surgical exts and implant placements. All the specialists that come are very helpful and are pretty hands-off unless you want their help, so you get a lot of good experience performing these procedures by yourself. As implant placement is a hot item for post-grad education, to give you an idea of where we stand, in the first 7 months of the program all 6 of us have placed at least one implant (and I think at most 4) with the first one placed as early as September. There's still another 5 months of this program left, and I'm pretty sure we all have more implant placements lined up.
Aside from the procedures, another thing I've learned in this residency is treatment planning of full-mouth cases. All of us have patients where we didn't know where to start because there is so much going on in terms of perio, restorability, loss of posterior support, and cosmetic issues. This program gives you the tools to approach these cases in a systematic way. There are so many things that I wouldn't have known to look for, but now going through the treatment planning process of not only my difficult cases but also my residents', I feel much more confident handling a full-mouth case in private practice.
The downside...
- It's exhausting. We don't have a shortage of patients and if you think you're going to have a 2hr gap to sit around, guess again because there's probably a walk-in emergency patient waiting or Dr. Smith (the director) has thrown you a new patient exam of someone he just screened. Our schedule generally looks like this: Clinic on M,T,W,F from 8am-5pm, morning meetings on M,W, and recently F from 7:30am-8am, tx planning seminars on M from 5:30pm-7:30pm (but has been known to go until 8:15pm). On Thursdays, you take classes with other residents in Westwood and the schedule varies.
- The stipend is $20,000 and you live in LA. This is difficult, but if you can get financial help then it's worth it. We learn a lot.
- The patients are crazy. I don't know about where you went to dental school, but at Nova, they must have screened out for crazy because this is a new level of crazy for me
- Did i mention I'm chronically exhausted?
- There are only 5 other people so you better like/be nice to them. Thankfully, all 6 of us this year get along pretty well and hang out outside of the program too
- For the most part, the faculty are nice/tolerable... sometimes certain ones give you a hard time and it's annoying
- No chairside assistants. We have staff assistants, but you don't get your own assistant unless you're performing surgery. IsoLite becomes your best friend. The assistants do set up, break down, grab you things, get your patients, take x-rays, etc.
- Paper charts & film x-rays. My dental school had all EHRs and digital xrays, so it's mildly annoying that I have to sort through a folder full of x-rays. All the med history and perio charting is in the paper chart and the tx planning and daily notes are done on the computer. They are planning to move to all digital in the next few months though
- On-call. Every 3 weeks, 2 residents have to carry a pager and respond to emergency calls. No one has actually had to go into clinic on an emergency in the last few years. You just have to return the call within 10min and the pager only works a certain distance from UCLA so you can't leave the city when you're on call. I personally have only received 2 calls in 7 months, and they were both easy questions handled over the phone. Other residents have had to call in prescriptions, but that's the extent of it.
Other random info I thought of:
- We're all lent a camera for the year so you don't have to buy one
- Recently, they installed more x-ray units so now all the chairs have x-ray units
- Venice is a hip area with lots of great new restaurants, but also lots of homeless people
- You get 10 sick/personal days (same thing) for the year plus 8 holidays not including 2 weeks off in December
- We have an endo microscope
- The implant systems we use are Astra, Zimmer, and Biomet 3i
All in all - it really is a great program and you learn a lot that will definitely benefit you in private practice but expect to be worked to the bone. Hope that was helpful - if you have more Qs, PM me but be patient for a response because I don't log into SDN very often
