Page 28 - The Dental Workforce in Malaysia

10 | The Dental Workforce in Malaysia

Qualification Agency (MQA) (Commissioner of Law Revision Malaysia,
1971). The Table also reports that eight more recent operating schools are
all private; which reflects government action to increase the volume of
graduates with some support from the private sector. This was reinforced
by the introduction of a more liberal services sector in the country since
2011, including involving private universities (Ministry of International
Trade and Industry Malaysia, 2014). This mimics the global trend of
making education a source of a country’s economy, as part of the main
national agenda (Torres, 2009).
In addition, there is an ongoing concern about the volume of foreign
dental graduates who return to Malaysia with a majority of them educated
in India, Indonesia, the Middle East and the UK (Malaysian Dental
Council, 2017). Regarding the tuition fees, students in the public sector
are reported to pay an annual fee of approximately US$450 per year as the
government provide highly subsidised tuition fees. Meanwhile, students
in private institutions spent from US$71,518 (Penang International Dental
School, PIDC) to US$142,703 (International Medical University, IMU)
for their tuition fees in 2019, as reported by the respective institutions’
websites (PIDC, 2019, IMU, 2019). The tuition and fees increase every
year and similar to the policy of other countries, international students
are required to pay higher fees than home students.

Postgraduate Training

In regard to postgraduate training and workforce development for
specialists, since the 1950s, dental officers in Malaysia were sent abroad
to attend postgraduate programmes in various fields, namely oral surgery,
orthodontics, and dental public health (Oral Health Division Malaysia,
2013a). Over time, the training for specialisation has been conducted
locally, by only four to five local institutions; with some of them having
alternate years of student recruitment (Malaysian Dental Council, 2014b).
Because of that, many dentists are still sent to foreign universities in
comparison to their medical counterparts due to the limited number of
places for postgraduate training in Malaysia, given there is a high volume
of applicants from the large volume of dentist pools in the country. Most
of these dental officers are sent to universities in the UK and US, but they