Sir, further to the well-argued letter from Dr Len D'Cruz A fascinating insight (BDJ 2012; 212: 356), this is just what we are doing for final year students from King's College London. Working in an inner city Dental Academy with and alongside hygiene therapy and dental nursing students of the University of Portsmouth, the clinical teaching is delivered by general dental practitioners with accumulatively hundreds of years of high quality general dental practice experience. They are enthused and passionate about delivering an experience to the students that is both reflective and contemporary to modern dental practice. The aim of this primary care outreach experience is to bridge that gap between the dental school experience and FT1.

The Dental Academy operates to a PDS plus contract with UDA and KPI targets which is commissioned by the NHS commissioners in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, with students providing appropriate care for patients. They learn to give brief interventions for smoking cessation and sign post for alcohol awareness and chlamydia screening. The restorative dentistry is far from being 'composite exclusive', with the students using both high level rotary and conventional endodontic therapy, amalgam restorations as well as getting to grips with surgical dentistry and immediate dentures. We are evaluating both the students' experience of team care provision as well as the actual dentistry they are doing with two concurrent PhD studentships. The students tell us they love the experience, which has been reported many times previously by other outreach projects both in this country and in the USA.1,2

We are confident with this approach that these very able young dentists are better prepared for general dental practice as 'safe beginners'.3 Moreover, they are well able to meet the challenges and benefit from the developments in dental practice over their next 30-40 years of practising life.