The Development of Professional Identity Within UK Dental Undergraduates

Professional identity is a developmental process, achieved in stages of a period of time, while internalizing the profession’s norms, attributes and values, resulting in thinking, acting and feeling like members of that profession. The development of professional identity of students as a research topic comes from self-reflection of my own professional ‘journey’ from that to being foremost a clinician, then an educator and finally a researcher.
This commentary on seven of my published papers has explored aspects of professional identity development within UK dental undergraduates covering three main themes: their morals and ethics along with their use of alcohol, smoking and illicit drugs; their career intentions and factors influencing their choice of later specialisation; and development of their clinical skills.

My research has a number of key findings including that professional identity starts to develop even before becoming a dental undergraduate and continues to evolve throughout a dentist’s career. Many factors influence the development of a dental undergraduate’s professional identity, including their background, their dental education and role models within their school, their clinical experience, oversight from the General Dental Council and need to act professionally coupled with their career aspirations and goals.

This research is important so that we can better prepare dental undergraduates for working as oral healthcare providers within the 21st century.