A representation of practice was used to create a context in which participants' discussion about students' work could be concrete.
JDPBRN is a consortium of dental practices with a broad representation of practice types, treatment philosophies and patient populations and it has a shared mission with the DPBRN, 14 now called the National DPBRN (http://NationalDentalPBRN.org).
The network has a wide representation of practice types, treatment philosophies, and patient populations, including diversity regarding race, ethnicity, gender, geography and rural/urban area of residence of both its practitioners and their patients.
The recruitment of just 5 12 patients/site may have been insufficient to ensure adequate representation of practice in each centre, especially given the wide diversity of patients and goals for treatment.
However, the students underwent a competency- based assessment which measures what they do in a controlled representation of practice, such as an OSCE, rather than a performance -based assessment, measuring what they do in actual professional practice [ 30] so their performance in assessment of patients with diabetes in the workplace may not be superior to that of the control group.
If social practices are affected by attempts to audit them then the picture generated is not only a poor representation of practice (at the very least the data is often out of date) but the assumed primary virtue of this information, its decontextualized nature, is undermined.
The limitations include the potential for bias from over-representation of practices with specialty training accreditation, and the use of a small convenience sample of volunteer enthusiasts.
This may in part reflect the under-representation of practices in deprived areas, which tend to have higher proportions of people from ethnic minority groups and hence diabetes, in the database used in this study.
