Grinz,
I'm not sure how much info you received during your interview, but there are quite a few things that I will help clarify. The GPR at UNLV is not truly part of the school. Specifically, all faculty (Dr. Neubaur-perio, Dr. Braun-prosth, Dr. McAlpine-GP program director, etc) only teach at the GPR and are not shared with the pre-doc clinic. In fact, the GPR was established long before the school was created and therefore is relatively independent from UNLV' SDM politics. The current GPR clinic location was moved to UNLV SDM's campus in 2018 or so, but are not necessarily part of the school itself. This means residents do not feel like a 5th year of dental school.
Benefits of the program:
-Spend about a month at a Las Vegas VA doing prosth
-Excellent experience in IV sedation and wisdom teeth EXT (you will perform a min. of 20 sedation cases)
-Lots of Implant and bone graft experiences available: UNLV's pre-doc students must refer all implant cases to GPR
-Hospital rotation where you will learn to communicate with other healthcare workers. This will require you to be on call during your rotation but you might find it's not relevant to dentistry (however, you will see observe/treat some medical emergencies during this time).
-Moderate amount of endo cases including surgical cases (ie apicos) may be available. The reason why endo is not a major selling point is because the GPR does not see Medicaid patients; therefore they are referred to the UNLV pre-doc clinic since their clinic accepts lower insurance reimbursements. Previous GPR residents have performed many endo cases and later accepted at endo residencies shortly after complete their GPR at UNLV, so it's dependant on the resident's ambitions.
-Opportunity to complete a second GPR year. Every year, one student is allowed to stay an additional year in which they can tailor their experiences to their liking, including spending more time at a local VA hospital to complete additional prosth cases. You will have less opportunity to tailor your experiences as a 1-year GPR resident at UNLV.
-I think the current stipend is about 50k/year and you will receive a meal stipend at the local hospital across the street (called UMC).
-Assistants are all great and want to help the residents
Some negatives:
-Faculty are old and prefer that you do things a certain way every time. One of them insists that you use a microscope for everything, including for wisdom teeth extractions for example.
-Recently, the program director came under fire due to salary overpayment made to him by the school (read
here). I don't think this has affected the residents' experiences, however.
-Living in las vegas is not what you would imagine if you are from out of state. However, it's cheaper than living in California.
I don't have too much familiarity with VA GPRs other than that patients do not pay for anything.
Overall, it's a difficult decision but regardless of which GPR you end up at, you will benefit from the additional training. Once you complete a GPR year, the learning will never stop and you must continue taking CEs to further your skills. Anything you did not learn in a GPR, you can learn through (sometimes expen$ive) CE courses.
Good luck on match day.
