The Institute of Dentistry at Queen Mary University of London and Barts Health NHS Dental & OMFS Network have been awarded £2.3 million by Barts Charity for a digital project set to transform oral healthcare.

Joe McQuillan (Clinical Director, Dentistry, OMFS & Ophthalmology), Shakeel Shahdad (Lead Restorative Dentistry), Nikos Donos (Director of Research), Charles Gutteridge (Chief Clinical Information Officer), and Paul Coulthard (Dean for Dentistry and Institute Director) led the funding bid. There are three discrete work packages within the project.

The Clinical Work Package will deliver a digitised patient record developed from a dental specific solution within Cerner Millennium, and also upgrade the clinical and lab based equipment to a fully digital workflow for patient treatments. The Research Work Package is to use the data generated from Clinical Work Package for interdisciplinary clinical research and service evaluation for the benefit of patients. Projects are already planned around oral health and impacts of systemic health outcomes, and around domestic violence and facial and dental injury.

The Training and Education Work Package will accelerate clinical learning and training using Virtual Reality and Haptic Stations in the pre-clinical simulation teaching. The funding will provide an additional 15 Virtual Reality Simodont Dental Trainers for students and NHS trainees.

This Digital Transformation project will bring together expertise from across the University and NHS Trust. The Clinical Work Package Leads are Shakeel Shahdad, Joe McQuillan and Charles Gutteridge. The Research Work Package Leads are Nikos Donos, Charles Gutteridge and Kristina Kay. The Training Work Package Leads are Paul Coulthard, Amitha Ranauta and Ben Audsley.