Page 26 - The Dental Workforce in Malaysia

8 | The Dental Workforce in Malaysia

ii) Dental specialists

The role of a dental specialist is to provide a high level of care and to
treat more complex procedures which are referred from both the private
and public primary care clinics; however, there are some private clinics
that provide direct access to such treatments. Meanwhile, the previous
Dental Act of 1971 has no provision on the registration for Malaysian
dental specialists (Commissioner of Law Revision Malaysia, 1971). It is
imperative to note that previously all of these specialists were registered
as dentists with the MDC. Therefore, the dentists’ database published
by the MDC also represents the volume of specialists in the country.
Previously, the MDC strongly recommended qualified specialists to be
registered with the National Specialist Register (NSR). As a result, the
accurate total volume of dental specialists in the country is unknown.
However, following the newly tabled Dental Act 2018 comprises several
major amendments to the previous acts such as market changes for dental
therapists, the introduction of divisions for dental specialists and dental
therapists. With the provision for a specialist division under the newly
tabled Dental Act 2018 (Malaysian Dental Council, 2018), the accurate
number of specialist will be revealed soon. This registration with the
MDC can be a self-regulation practice that can help maintain the high
standards of specialist practices in the country as well as safeguarding the
Malaysian public (Malaysian Dental Council, 2018).
At the moment, only nine dental specialities are recognised by
the Public Service Department (PSD), namely, oral surgery, paediatric
dentistry, oral pathology/oral medicine, orthodontics, periodontology,
restorative dentistry, special needs dentistry, forensic dentistry and
dental public health. Consequently, the total volume of specialists is
reported to be increasing over time considering constant expenditure on
postgraduate training (Oral Health Division Malaysia, 2013a, Malaysian
Dental Association, 2014). Nevertheless, only the MOH publishes the
volume of working specialists through the type of speciality, and the most
recent volume was reported in 2016 with 325 specialists (Oral Health
Programme Malaysia, 2018). In terms of the specialists’ workloads, the
available MOH data only revealed specialist workload as reflected by the
ratio of patients seen and treated by these specialists; the number ranged