West Virginia - Valley Health - AEGD

Valley Health System’s dental program offers an accredited one year Advanced Education in General Dentistry Program (AEGD) with a mission to provide a robust and diverse advanced education experience to individuals planning a career in general dentistry. Valley Health (www.valleyhealth.org) is a network of community health centers that provides primary and preventative care to approximately 65,000 patients each year in southern West Virginia, southeastern Ohio and eastern Kentucky.

Valley Health is located in Huntington, WV, recently named one of “America’s Best Communities” (www.cityofhuntington.com). Huntington is located on the Ohio River and offers a vibrant downtown with easy access to housing, entertainment, restaurants and multiple festivals throughout the year. Huntington is also home to Marshall University, a historic public university with a student body of over 13,000 students (www.marshall.edu). Marshall University provides the community with many cultural events through the School of Performing Arts as well as NCAA Division 1 sporting events as a member of Conference USA (www.conferenceusa.com). The Marshall University Medical Center includes schools of medicine, pharmacy, and physical therapy. For outdoor enthusiasts, West Virginia is “Almost Heaven”.

Our AEGD program emphasizes comprehensive oral health care as part of integrated primary health care system. You will learn to provide dental care to medically compromised patients by working in concert with Valley Health medical experts in pediatrics, internal medicine, family medicine, OB/GYN, ENT, behavioral health and pharmacy. Our mission at Valley Health is to provide access to care for the underserved. As such, we have a vast pool of patients with diverse unmet dental needs with few or no specialty resources that offers you the opportunity to learn how to manage complicated cases and enhance your clinical skills in all aspects of general dentistry. You will also have the opportunity to rotate through our walk-in clinic that will challenge your critical thinking and diagnostic skills to learn to effectively deal with emergent dental problems.

Our training centers at Valley Health-East Huntington, Westmoreland, and Wayne are modern facilities that each house a medical, dental, and a behavioral health department. Valley-Health East Huntington and Wayne also include a pharmacy department with pharmacy residents and an optometry department. Each center is fully equipped with modern equipment that includes Dentrix electronic dental records, digital radiography, nitrous oxide, and an endodontic rotary and obturation system.

As part of the Valley Health oral health team, you will be afforded additional educational opportunities over and above the AEGD didactic requirements. You will be participating in our dental section meetings that include lunch and learn opportunities on innovative products and techniques from dental vendors, interesting and unusual case presentations by Valley Health dentists, and discussion of staff, personnel management, insurance, billing, and account receivable issues. Valley Health also conducts general provider (all disciplines) meetings that focus on general themes including risk management, quality assurance and improvement as well as other topics of general interest. Other training sessions are offered throughout the year by the human resources department on such topics as leadership training and conflict resolution and by the nursing department on basic CPR and Narcan administration as well as other subjects.