Teaching, service and community: Preceptorship as an integrating link

The National Curriculum Guidelines established the competencies and skills for the training of the general dental surgeon. Curricular internships should be developed articulated with increasing complexity throughout the dental surgeon's training process and with faculty supervision. The preceptors are health professionals with a teaching-care supervision function who must integrate teaching, service and community in the context of the Unified Health System. The objective of this study was to report the experience of preceptorship in the dentistry course. This is a descriptive experience report, carried outfrom September 2023 to April 2024, in a family health unit, by the dental surgeon preceptorwhen accompanying the students of the dentistry course. The preceptor must be able to provide the student with an overview of dentistry that offers resolvability for most cases. During the preceptorship, students had the opportunity to follow and carry out numerous activities, namely: anamnesis, follow-up and guidance to all life cycles (children, adults, pregnant women and the elderly); treatment of Day House boarding schools (alcohol and drug users undergoing treatment); urgent and emergency care, treatment of complications (dentoalveolar fracture, alveolitis, pulpectonia, pulpotomy, abscesses, etc.); minor surgeries (tooth extraction, residual root extraction); orominor surgery, referral to endodontics; making veneers; prophylaxis, restorations and cleaning of dental materials. All consultations were based on the comprehensiveness of care, seeking to assist and identify the weaknesses of student learning. The preceptorship, through the teaching-care supervision, was able to provide the students with the integration between teaching, service and the community served by the Unified Health System (SUS), enabling the student to articulate the technical knowledge to the practice of the services with the reality of the communities served by the SUS.