30 January 2005	Sunday	19 Zilhaj 1425

KARACHI, Jan 29: Health experts at a national moot on dentistry on Saturday stressed the need to boost output of trained dentists, to determine minimum quality of dental care and to identify the steps for achieving desired standards in the field.

On the opening day of the moot on 'Strategic directions for dental education in Pakistan' held at the College of Physicians and Surgeons (CPSP), speakers said individual and institutional responsibilities and roles were also needed to be identified.

The ultimate aim was to produce able dental practitioners to provide the people with much needed care in the country, the speakers said, adding such practitioners would include generalists as well as dental specialists.

They held that the people concerned with educational development and delivery of dental care should help address the related issues.

CPSP President Prof Sultan Farooqui said that in a country of 151 million, with 67 per cent of the population living in the rural areas, the concept of oral health and hygiene certainly deserved priority attention from the medical community, keeping in view that a large proportion of such diseases was preventable.

Currently, the number of registered dental surgeons in the country was 5,747, giving the ratio of one dentist for 26,000 people, which contrasted sharply with the western scenario, where one dentists was available for 2,000 people, he added.

In order to reach an optimum population-dentists ration, he said many more practitioners needed to be added to this force. Dental specialists registered with the PMDC were 366, which gave a specialist-population ratio of one for 409,836 population, he said.

He said if immediate steps were not taken to address the situation, the dental health care system here might reach a collapse by 2010, as population was projected to be 195.1 million by the time.

The paucity of expert dental faculty in the country needed to be remedied on an urgent footing, reasons for the shortfall must be addressed, and suitable strategies outlined, he said, pointing out that dental colleges were mushrooming here having varying standards given the lack of faculty and other educational resources.-PPI