Dr Jilen Patel

Dr. Jilen Patel is a specialist paediatric dentist, senior lecturer at the University of Western Australia and a Consultant at Perth Children’s Hospital. For over a decade, Jilen has been involved with providing volunteer dental services to remote Aboriginal communities and is the current chairman of the Kimberley Dental Team. Jilen's research interests include dental public health and cariology, and he is the current president of the IADR ANZ WA Section. His PhD study centres on continuous quality improvement for dental care to Indigenous communities. He is also the chief investigator of an Australian first clinical trial investigating the efficacy of topical fluorides on caries arrest among refugee children. Jilen is passionate about unravelling and conveying evidence to help clinicians better understand complex concepts and he has received both the Royal Australasian College Emerging Lecturer Award and the Australian Dental Association/Pierre Fauchard Academy's Young Lecturer Award. Jilen recently received the ADA Outstanding Young Dentist Award for his contribution to the profession.

Sponsored by Colgate

What constitutes a carious lesion? Is it a brown spot, a white spot, a cavitation or a mix of all of these??

This masterclass will provide participants with an interactive tutorial on the diagnosis and detection of carious lesions. It will also help guide the distinction between defects of enamel and their classification.

Participants will also be able to get hands on with detection tools such as detector dyes, diagnodent and diagnocam to explore their accuracy in caries detection and diagnosis.

Do we provide ‘what is good enough’ or strive for ‘what is the best possible?’

Dentistry has increasingly become preoccupied with productivity, increasing the reach of services and meeting accreditation thresholds. Primary health care prides itself on continuous quality improvement (CQI), however this is rarely practiced in dentistry. This lecture will explore quality assurance vs quality improvement and the ways in which CQI can be implemented into dental services particularly when working with Indigenous communities.

Volunteering: the word itself conjures feelings of generosity, altruism and community-based care but is dental volunteering truly a help or more of a hinderance?

This lecture reviews the work of the Kimberley Dental Team, a non-government, volunteer-led organisation operating among remote Aboriginal Australian communities over the last decade. It presents some of the highs and the lows and showcases the lessons learnt working in some of the world’s most isolated and challenging environments.