Dental practitioners, academics, students, hygienists, assistants, office staff, and patients are invited to submit essays, videos, and more about their COVID-19 experiences to the National Museum of Dentistry.
In response to COVID-19’s impact on the dental profession, the American Dental Association (ADA) will launch the JADA+ COVID-19 Monograph, a collection of insights, stories and personal reflections from dental practitioners as they journey through the pandemic.
Guest edited by Scott Swank, DDS, the curator of the Dr Samuel D. Harris National Museum of Dentistry, and a clinical assistant professor at the University of Maryland School of Dentistry in Baltimore, the monograph will serve as an archive of the dental community’s experiences and histories during the pandemic.
“I think it is a great idea to create an archive of how the dental industry, in general, managed to deal with, cope with and, ultimately, get through this COVID-19 event,” Swank said. “I am excited to be a part of collecting and preserving the history of how COVID-19 affected the dental practice. We are already receiving interesting material from people with stories to tell. Hopefully this monograph will prove invaluable in 100 years for allowing future generations to understand how we persevered during the COVID-19 crisis.”
The ADA invites all segments of the dental community to participate in this project, including dental practitioners, academics, students, hygienists, assistants, office staff, and patients. The ADA is interested in receiving items of personal reflection, creative work, or anything that documents the community’s thoughts, emotions, and experiences during the pandemic to consider for inclusion in the monograph.
Submissions may include journal entries; personal essays; articles on COVID-19’s impact on dental practice, research and academia; poems; short stories; photographs, graphics or other visual art pieces; music, podcasts or other audio recordings; videos; screenshots of personal websites, blogs or social media posts; and more. Submissions and questions can be sent to [email protected] with “COVID-19 Monograph” in the subject line.
Because the monograph will be produced in a digital format, it can accommodate multimedia presentations, including images, graphics, podcasts and videos, in addition to text. The archive will serve as a living document intended to capture the experience of the dental community throughout the pandemic and into recovery.
