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The dental workforce is increasingly gender diverse. This study analyzed gender differences in dental practice using the American Dental Association's 2010-2016 Masterfile and the 2017 Survey of Dental Practice. Between 2010 and 2016, the proportion of women working in dentistry increased from 24.5% to 29.8%. Overall, female dentists were more racially/ethnically diverse, more likely to be foreign-trained, and more likely to work in pediatric dentistry than male dentists. The likelihood of female dentists working as employees, part-time, and/or in metropolitan areas was 1.2 to 4.2 times greater compared with male dentists. Female solo practitioners were 1.2 to 1.8 times more likely to provide services to children and patients covered by public insurance than male solo practitioners. Gender diversification in dentistry and other factors, including generational differences and changes in the dental service delivery system and public policy, will continue to reshape the delivery of oral health services.

BACKGROUND: Dental therapists (DTs) are primary care dental providers, used globally, and were introduced in the United States (US) in 2005. DTs have now been adopted in 13 states and several Tribal nations. OBJECTIVES: The objective of this study is to qualitatively examine the drivers and outcomes of the US dental therapy movement through a health equity lens, including community engagement, implementation and dissemination, and access to oral health care. METHODS: The study compiled a comprehensive document library on the dental therapy movement including literature, grant documents, media and press, and gray literature. Key stakeholder interviews were conducted across the spectrum of engagement in the movement. Dedoose software was used for qualitative coding. Themes were assessed within a holistic model of oral health equity. FINDINGS: Health equity is a driving force for dental therapy adoption. Community engagement has been evident in diverse statewide coalitions. National accreditation standards for education programs that can be deployed in 3 years without an advanced degree reduces educational barriers for improving workforce diversity. Safe, high-quality care, improvements in access, and patient acceptability have been well documented for DTs in practice. CONCLUSION: Having firmly taken root politically, the impact of the dental therapy movement in the US, and the long-term health impacts, will depend on the path of implementation and a sustained commitment to the health equity principle.

The health workforce has been greatly affected by COVID-19. In this commentary, we describe the articles included in this health workforce research supplement and how the issues raised by the authors relate to the COVID-19 pandemic and rapidly changing health care environment.

Current efforts to fight the Covid-19 pandemic aim to slow viral spread and increase testing, protect health care workers from infection, and obtain ventilators and other equipment to prepare for a surge of critically ill patients. But additional actions are needed to rapidly increase health workforce capacity and to replenish it when personnel are quarantined or need time off to rest or care for sick family members. It seems clear that health care delivery organizations, educators, and government leaders will all have to be willing to cut through bureaucratic barriers and adapt regulations to rapidly expand the U.S. health care workforce and sustain it for the duration of the pandemic.

Policies ensuring that research data are available on public archives are increasingly being implemented at the government [1], funding agency [2-4], and journal [5, 6] level. These policies are predicated on the idea that authors are poor stewards of their data, particularly over the long term [7], and indeed many studies have found that authors are often unable or unwilling to share their data [8-11]. However, there are no systematic estimates of how the availability of research data changes with time since publication. We therefore requested data sets from a relatively homogenous set of 516 articles published between 2 and 22 years ago, and found that availability of the data was strongly affected by article age. For papers where the authors gave the status of their data, the odds of a data set being extant fell by 17% per year. In addition, the odds that we could find a working e-mail address for the first, last, or corresponding author fell by 7% per year. Our results reinforce the notion that, in the long term, research data cannot be reliably preserved by individual researchers, and further demonstrate the urgent need for policies mandating data sharing via public archives.