President's Message

Collaborating With Our Dental Colleagues

By Jason Reynolds, MD
SPS President

For decades the dental community has led the way when it comes to sedation care of children who require painful or distressing procedures.  As far back as the 1800s, Horace Well, a dentist, was involved in paving the way for the use of nitrous oxide as a sedation agent.  In his famous 1844 demonstration at Union Hall in Hartford, Connecticut, he publicly showed the ability of nitrous oxide to safely produce an “intoxicated” state which provided analgesia and amnesia when a painful stimulus was applied.  Fast forward to the last 50 years and we again see that the largest group of sedation providers, especially in the outpatient setting, is within the dental community.

With that in mind, I'm happy to announce that we are partnering with the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry (AAPD) to begin data collection on sedation of children in the outpatient dental setting.  This partnership will take place within the Dartmouth Bioinformatics Center to develop a unique data collection tool that will be modeled after the existing PSRC data collection tool.  Much in the same way the PSRC began, this new project will allow us to start to understand the practice patterns of this special patient population.  It will also allow us to begin to ask specific questions about that practice so that we can continue to move toward our shared mission of improving sedation care for children.

I am especially excited about this new partnership because I believe it will bring the physician and dental community together in a mutually beneficial way.  As physicians, we all realize that more and more of medical care is being shifted to the outpatient setting.  Our dental colleagues are really the experts in this type of sedation care and we have much to learn from them as we expand our hospital-based programs into the outpatient setting.  If you are interested in getting involved or would like more information about this new partnership please reach out to me anytime.

Sincerely,

Jason Reynolds, MD
president@pedsedation.org