A competency-based framework for training in advanced dental education: experience in a community-based dental partnership program.

While goals and objectives are useful to assess programmatic outcomes, they are not able to evaluate individual trainees' performance and/or corrective actions needed to improve performance. As a result, competency-based evaluation is increasingly being used to assess trainee performance at both the doctoral and postdoctoral levels. However, the translation of broadly stated competency statements into evaluable action statements continues to pose a challenge, especially in nontechnical domains such as the assessment and integration of cultural and sociodemographic variables in the development and execution of treatment plans. This article describes a process used to develop a competency-based framework that includes specific evaluable action statements to assess the performance of Advanced Education in General Dentistry (AEGD) residents providing dental care services to medically compromised patients in a community-based partnership program. Although the resultant framework may not itself be generalizable across training programs, the process described to develop the framework can be used by those individuals involved in evaluating students and/or residents in training programs.