Page 25 - The Dental Workforce in Malaysia

Introduction | 7

there were only 20 dentists working in the public sector and around 50
working in the private sector, and a majority of these dentists were based
in urban areas (Oral Health Division Malaysia, 2003). To overcome the
shortage of dentists, many dental schools were opened in an attempt to
modernise the health care system. In 2016, there were 7,210 registered
dentists across Malaysia; in this regard the Malaysian Dental Council
(2017) stated that the dentist to population ratio in Malaysia was 1: 4,297
based on Division 1 Dental Practitioners with APCs only.
Given the current ratio and the rapid growth of the dental school, the
aim of 1:4,000 dentists to population ratio set by the Oral Health Division
(OHD), Ministry of Health (MOH) to be reached by 2020 has been
revised to 1:3,000 (Ministry of Health Malaysia, 2011, Malaysian Dental
Council, 2015a). However, there are still disparities in the distribution of
dentists as their numbers vary from state to state, and it was reported that
most dentists are concentrated in Peninsular Malaysia and urban areas
(Ministry of Health Malaysia, 2010, Malaysian Dental Council, 2015a)
as private practitioners.
In 2016, the majority of dentists were working in the public sector
(63.7%); mainly under the MOHs while the remainder were serving the
Ministry of Higher Education and the Malaysian Dental Corps (Malaysian
Dental Council, 2017). On the other hand, as the volume of dentists in
the public sector increased, insufficiencies of dental chairs began to
surface; the latest statistics suggested that 2 dentists shared a dental
chair (Ministry of Health Malaysia, 2017); and this volume however is
expected to probably decrease on the next few years following the newly
introduced contract-based dental officer in the country (Fong, 2017). In
the meantime, more than two-thirds of Malaysian dentists are female
(Malaysian Dental Council, 2017), which follows the similar trend
with other countries (Stewart et al., 2004); however, no information is
available on private practitioners’ working patterns to determine whether
the dentists are working full or part-time.
In summary, the dentist to population ratio in Malaysia is improving
gradually. However, there are disparities in workforce distribution and
dental facilities between the area (rural or urban) and the sector (public
or private) served. There is also little evidence on the impact of the
increasing volume of female dentists on the capacity of the workforce.