Dental educators from across Africa met to build a continental association
Treating a patient's pain helps one person. Strengthening how a continent trains its dentists is a different order of ambition.
Untreated dental disease causes constant pain, malnutrition and life-threatening infection. It is not a cosmetic problem.
Bringing dental educators together
Dental professionals and educators from a large number of African nations gathered for a symposium on dental education, and used it to establish an association intended to serve the continent.
The people in the room were not recipients of a programme. They were the deans, lecturers and clinicians who decide how the next generation of African dentists is trained.
Why Mercy Ships is involved in this at all
Mercy Ships runs dental clinics during every field service and has provided very large numbers of dental procedures over the years. That work relieves pain and prevents infection, but it treats the people who reach the clinic.
Supporting the institutions that train dentists addresses the reason those clinics are overwhelmed in the first place.
The connection back to surgery
Dental clinics are frequently the first healthcare contact a person has had in years. Patients arrive expecting an extraction and are found to have tumours, infections or conditions requiring surgery.
A stronger dental workforce therefore means earlier detection of conditions that would otherwise be discovered far too late.
