AZ Board of Dental Examiners held its first special meeting to discuss proposed dental therapy rules on July 17th. They pushed much of the discussion around the rules to a special meeting in August. That meeting has now been scheduled for Friday, August 21 at 8am.
The BODEX staff have indicated that a new version of the rules is being developed that incorporates suggestions from stakeholders, including the Board, AzDA (Arizona Dental Association) and the Arizona Oral Health Coalition.
Here’s the AzDA’s recommendations. Their recommended changes, among other limitations, would eliminate the “limited license” provisions of the coalition draft. This would mean that a dental therapist who was educated in a different state and doesn’t have training in the complete scope for dental therapists in Arizona, would not be able to practice until they could show that they had received training and were competent to perform 100% of Arizona’s dental therapy scope.
