I believe that apropos of clinical training, the Dental School and Hospital have had special relationships with other health care institutions in Melbourne, such as the Alfred Hospital.

John Harcourt: The Alfred was probably easier to get to for dental students, who were then located at Spring Street, than the Melbourne Hospital. And I think Professor Amies had operating rights at the Alfred. Our anaesthetist, Geoffrey Kaye,[79] was also on the staff of both institutions.

Hector Orams: Amies was the consulting oral surgeon at the Alfred and when I was a student there was a close relationship between it and the Dental School.

Ann Westmore: Did that relationship continue when the Dental School moved to Elizabeth St?

John Harcourt: That was when the Dental School started using the Royal Melbourne.

Henry Atkinson: Because there was a Professor of Medicine and a Professor of Surgery at the Royal Melbourne and we were part of the University, we had to use their services, whereas at the Alfred it was more or less a personal arrangement between the College and the Hospital. [80]

Mike Morgan: Medicine and surgery are now minor components of the dental course. In fifth year, the students go out to various hospitals [where they are exposed to these areas], but it’s not a very extensive part of the course.

Hector Orams: This is something in the education of dentists that has changed. In my time the British tradition was followed, where a good deal of medicine and surgery was taught in the Dental School. There was a much closer relationship between dentists and medicos in England, I found, than there was in Australia.

I think now, it’s gone more towards the American pattern of emphasising the technical side of dentistry rather than the medical side. I don’t know if I’m correct about that or not, but it seems to me that gradually medicine and surgery, and pathology and so forth, have been watered down, if not eliminated. I think that’s because the curriculum is a bit crowded. I guess there’s so much to fit into five years.

Gerry Dalitz: Anaesthesia has followed the same trend. Advances in medical anaesthesia are now so vast that you couldn’t do much in the dental course, even if you wanted.

Mike Morgan: Students don’t do any hands-on anaesthesia any more. They observe general anaesthetics being given.

Peter Reade: I’m not sure about the undergraduates, but graduate students are rotated through the Children’s Hospital, Monash, the Austin Hospital and particularly the Peter MacCallum [Cancer Institute].

Mike Morgan: What has happened in the clinical training is that whereas, when I arrived, all the dental clinical training was done in the Dental Hospital, in fifth year now - in line with other schools around the country - we send them out into the community. So they work a lot in community health centres and in hospitals. For the first time next year, they’ll have a compulsory rotation to Shepparton, a rural location. There’s a move to have them less on-site here than previously, giving them a wider experience.

Ann Westmore: Is that associated with the view that dental work is less hospital-based and more community-based these days?

Mike Morgan: I think we took the position that if we could give the students a broader experience than just being in one place - the Dental Hospital, that would be preferable. I don’t think it was to do with the sorts of things they could do here or outside.

John Harcourt: They do see a different style of patients.

Mike Morgan: Yes, they do and there’s less supervision, I suppose. At the Hospital here there tends to be very close supervision of one group of students by a demonstrator. When I was a student, it was the same. Nowadays, they tend to work together, so one works as the operator and the other as the assistant and then they swap around. It’s giving them a different experience.

Ann Westmore: How does this relate, if it does at all, to the Government’s interaction with the profession. Do they have any say in this?

John Rogers: Certainly, the [Victorian Human Services] Department has supported having clinical experience for dental students in community locations. So when clinics are being built, space is allocated for dental students. And there is support through funding to allow dental students to gain experience in community clinics. Budgets of agencies are adjusted so that they can support that clinical experience. Taking on students means that they can’t employ dentists to use those chairs. So there is some funding support available for that.

Certainly the clinical school at Shepparton that Mike mentioned is seen as an opportunity for dental students and dental therapists and prosthetists to get experience in a rural location so that when they graduate they consider working in the bush which is a real issue, not only for public dentistry but also for private dental care.

Witness to the History of Australian Medicine