Financial Impact of Providing New Veterinary Graduates with Veterinary Dental Education

It is generally agreed that by graduation, new veterinarians should have acquired the needed knowledge and skills to meet both client demands and professional expectations. However, studies have shown that dental education is lacking in veterinary colleges. A 2017 article surveyed North American veterinary schools, achieving an 86% response rate. Among those schools, more than 50% of the colleges provided less than 5 hours of veterinary dental education.
In 2025, the American veterinary corporation Southern Veterinary Partners (SVP) launched a program for new graduates, titled Dental Fundamentals, which is offered to new graduates in their first two years of practice. A Diplomate of the AVDC designed this course. This is a 2-day wet lab offering 15 RACE-approved hours of CE that teaches equipment and instruments, how to create a flap, extraction techniques, a brief discussion on dental radiographs, and local blocks in canine cadavers. The goal is to fill the gap in veterinary dental education as the new graduates enter clinical practice. SVP wanted to determine if the return on investment was financially beneficial to the company; therefore, the company employed a data analyst to review multiple data points. Currently, the company has a robust dataset on the production of new graduates in their first few years of practice. Accounting for several variables, that data is being compared to the new graduates who have participated in a 2-day wet lab. Additionally, the data for each attendee, both before and after the lab, is being evaluated.
Dental Fundamentals is a new course, launched in 2025. Before this course, SVP had developed a CE course called Dental Principles. This is a 21-hour RACE-approved CE course on veterinary dentistry offered to veterinarians at any part of their career. We learned that participating in this course increased dental production by ~$6,000 per veterinarian. We also learned that there were predictable trends in production following the course that warrant further investigation. Through discussion with the participating veterinarians, we have also identified common roadblocks, outside of education, that limit further growth and likely production as well.
In 2025, Southern Veterinary Partners merged with Mission Veterinary Partners to become Mission Pet Health. The leadership of this new company remains committed to veterinary dental education. By 2026, we should have robust data on the financial impact of providing 2 days of veterinary dental education to new graduates. This presentation will present the data collected so far.