To celebrate International Women’s Day, we are thrilled to share the story of Doctor of Dental Medicine (DMD) alum Dr. Liora Berant, who practices in Vancouver and volunteers her time teaching emergency medicine residents about dental trauma.

Oral health is an important part of overall health and wellbeing, yet medical students receive minimal training on dental traumas. Liora Berant, DMD 2016, wants to change this and is making an impact by lecturing emergency medicine residents on dental care.

Dentistry runs in Dr. Berant’s family—her parents own a dental practice in Vancouver and her brother is a periodontist and orthodontist in New York City. Dr. Berant worked as a pharmacist for a few years before following in her family’s footsteps and joining UBC Faculty of Dentistry as a DMD student in 2012.

Shortly after graduating from UBC, Dr. Berant completed a one-year general practice residency at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. When she returned to Vancouver, one of Dr. Berant’s friends who was completing an emergency medicine residency, mentioned that she had learned very little about oral health and how to treat dental traumas. Looking to share some of her expertise, Dr. Berant began volunteering her time to provide hands-on lectures to emergency residents. Since 2018, she has presented several lectures with a focus on identifying dental emergencies, replacing knocked out teeth, tooth splinting and delivering local anesthesia for dental traumas.

While some hospitals have emergency dentists on call, smaller hospitals and those in rural settings do not, so immediate treatment is left up to the emergency room physician.

“What happens in the mouth is connected to the rest of our body,” says Dr. Berant. “I want emergency doctors to recognize this and to have the confidence to diagnose dental traumas appropriately and understand how to provide basic treatments. Emergency residents have innovative thinking, so I hope my lectures give them some of the tools they need to treat their patients.”

Dr. Berant delivered a well-received lecture to nearly 40 emergency medicine residents last month.

“We’re all really excited to learn about this!” said one student who attended the lecture. “In medical school, we learn about the tooth itself but not much about how to treat it, so having a lecture like this is invaluable.”

For over three hours, the residents engaged and asked insightful questions as Dr. Berant shared several case studies. She had previously reached out to UBC Dentistry to borrow dentoforms that weren’t being used in clinic, and was able to share these with residents to practice splinting teeth after trauma.

Dr. Berant loves being a dentist and has a passion for the cosmetic side of the profession. But it’s opportunities like these—taking what she learned at UBC Dentistry, the University of Alberta and in her daily practice and sharing it beyond the dental community—that she especially enjoys.

“I love interacting with residents—they learn from me, but I also learn from them, and it’s this collaboration that helps us all grow,” she says. “I see dentistry as a specialty within medicine, and there’s so much we can do and offer to the community. Just like dentists, emergency room physicians have the chance to save someone’s smile, and it’s exciting to know that we can help even more people by learning and working together.”