Dental manpower planning in India: current scenario and future projections for the year 2020

Abstract

Dental manpower issues in India are discussed in this article which consists of both qualitative and quantitative research. The output of qualified dentists has increased substantially over last decade and at present there are over 117,825 dentists working in India. Although India has a dentist to population ratio of 1:10,271, the newly graduating dentists find it difficult to survive in the private sector. At present less than approximately 5% graduated dentists are working in the Government sector. If the present situation continues there will be more than one lakh dentists over supply by the year 2020. Continuation of the current situation will lead to wastage of highly trained dental manpower and create a threat to the professional integrity of the dentists. This research highlights the fact that there is an urgent need for an organised national human resource planning system to control the supply and demand of dental manpower, to ensure a uniform distribution of manpower and to give future directions to policy makers.

A global perspective on implant education: Cluster analysis of the “first dental implant experience” of dentists from 84 nationalities

“…Next, descriptive statistics and pairwise chi-square tests (P-value corrected using false discovery ratio (FDR), significant at P = 0.05) were applied to compare the frequency of response levels to 15 categorical Questionnaire items [10][11][12][13][14][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25] between the defined clusters.…”

Assessment of the Age of First Dental Visit among Dental Students in Nagpur, Maharashtra, India: A Cross-sectional Study

“…In India, currently, there are 310 dental colleges admitting around 30,570 dental undergraduates and about 3,000 postgraduates per year. [5][6][7] This number of dental undergraduates can play a magnificent role in providing awareness among common population regarding the importance of oral health, its impact on general health, and the need for early and regular dental visits. Further, out of the 310 dental colleges in the country, 292 are owned privately and many of these institutions are facing paucity of patients, thus requiring conductance of frequent oral health camps.…”

Assessment of the Status of National Oral Health Policy in India

“…Even with a dentist to population ratio of 1:10 271 which is less than that recommended by WHO for rising nations (1:7500), the budding dental surgeons in India get it hard to establish a private practice. 35 The geographical disproportion of dental colleges, erroneous dentist-population ratio, uneven specialist training, lack of dental auxiliaries, and insufficient dental workforce in rural areas and immigration and migration of dental workforce are restricting the dental care providers from fulfilling the dental needs of the people. There is faulty development of the manpower and no forecasting for the prospective changes in the disease pattern.…”

“…5 India is predominantly rural covering about 69% of the population. 1 Prevalence of oral diseases is very high in India with dental caries (50%, 52.5%, 61.4%, 79.2%, and 84.7% in 5,12,15,[35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44], and 65-74 year old, respectively) and periodontal diseases (55.4%, 89.2%, and 79.4% in 12, 35-44, and 65-74 years old, respectively) as the 2 most common oral diseases. 6 Oral health is an integral component of general health, 7-9 a tenet, no one can disagree with.…”