Student symposium focuses on EFP clinical treatment guideline for periodontitis

The EFP held an online symposium on September 17 involving students from the universities that teach the federation’s accredited postgraduate programme in periodontology.

The symposium focused on the recently published Treatment of Stage I-III Periodontitis: The EFP S3-level Clinical Practice Guideline, the first formal evidence-based guidelines for treating periodontitis.

The guideline – the product of Perio Workshop 2019, which evaluated 15 systematic reviews on different forms of periodontal therapy – offers a stepwise approach to treating patients with stages I, II, and III of periodontitis.

The symposium, held using the GoToWebinar application, involved presentations by students from 15 universities where the accredited programme is taught.

“We believe that the EFP-accredited postgraduate programmes, as the major academic and educational centres within the EFP, should be the ones to lead the implementation of the guideline (as happened with the new classification of periodontal and peri-implant diseases),” explained Moshe Goldstein, chair of the EFP postgraduate committee.

The online symposium was organised so that students from the programmes could learn together what to do with the new clinical practice guideline. Each of the universities was allocated a few chapters from the guideline and students gave presentations explaining the content and how it is being applied in their programmes.

As Prof Goldstein noted, while the basics and the knowledge are not new, the guideline represents “a new methodological way to decide on treatment procedures” that is better organised, but which may require some adaption by practitioners. “When implemented and used for periodontal patient care, it has the potential to have a major impact on the clinical practice of periodontology,” he added.

Commenting on the symposium, Prof Goldstein said that it had been “perfectly organised” by the EFP support team and that “the presentations were excellent – showing again the high level of the EFP postgraduate programmes and the quality of their students.”