Page 24 - The Dental Workforce in Malaysia

6 | The Dental Workforce in Malaysia

technicians and dental surgery assistants (DSAs) (Oral Health Division
Malaysia, 2005), as shown in Figure 1.1.
In Malaysia, both dental health professionals and dental therapists
are operating clinicians, and consequently, their job scopes are varied,
based on the age groups of the patients and the complexity of dental
treatment which they offer (Ministry of Health Malaysia, 2014). Sixty-
five percent of the operating clinicians are dental health professionals,
and a majority of them reported as working full-time in the public sector
in 2016. Meanwhile the remainder (35%) are dental therapists (Ministry
of Health Malaysia, 2017), who at the time of writing, were recently
allowed to work in the private sector, up to the age of 18 years old under
newly tabled Dental Act 2018 (Malaysian Dental Council, 2018).

Figure 1.1: The Current Dental Workforce in Malaysia.

Dental health professionals

i) Dentists

Practising dentists in the country must be registered with the Malaysian
Dental Council (MDC) and hold an Annual Practicing Certificate (APC)
to legalise their practices as dentists (Oral Health Division Malaysia,
2005).
After Malaysian independence in 1957, there was an acute shortage
in the dental workforce, which resulted in the inadequacy of trained dental
health professionals to deal with the significant number of caries cases
that occurred among the population of only seven million. At that time,