A Conversation with Dental Health Leader Frank Courts, DDS, PhD

is a pediatric dentist who has had a varied career in education and has practiced in North Carolina for the last two decades.He was heavily involved in Medicaid at the University of Florida before moving to North Carolina and becoming a Physicians Advisory Group (PAG) member.Courts is also a member of the North Carolina Dental Society (NCDS) and serves as chairman of its Council on Oral Health and Prevention.Courts led North Carolina's first school-based dental health program, with the primary goal of providing sealants in a school-based environment.He recently co-chaired the North Carolina Institute of Medicine (NCIOM) Oral Health Transformation Task Force [1], which envisioned a patientcentered future for oral health in North Carolina.Courts was also a member of the 2012-2013 Task Force on Children's Preventative Oral Health Services [2], which recommended policy changes that helped lead to legislation allowing dental hygienists to work in certain environments without direct supervision and to work with dental assistants in those environments [3]."I think that really kind of opened the door to schoolbased and community-based oral health programs for the underserved in North Carolina," said Courts.