Source: Radio New Zealand
AFP/ Thibaut Durand/ Hans Lucas
The head of the dental association says some clinics are waiting as long as a year to employ a dentist, and are having to close temporarily or even permanently.
NZDA chief executive Dr Mo Amso told Nine to Noon the number of dentists coming through the country’s only programme at Otago University was not enough, and needed to be increased from 60 to 90 per year.
He said the struggle to get dentists was also reflected in the wider dental clinic workforce with hygienists being hard to find.
“Quite a number of practices in New Zealand do encounter challenges with staffing and recruitment,” he said.
“A survey we ran late last year, and the report of which was released earlier this year, highlighted just how bad it is across the country in some places.
“As you’d imagine, it is worse off in rural areas, and the workforce shortages are not unique to only one cohort of people in the clinic, but it does include dentists, assistants and even hygienists.”
Dr Amso said on average, practices were taking six months or attract or replace a dentist, with some clinics waiting for up to a year.
He said that was forcing some to close.
“Imagine if you’re a dentist and you’re looking at selling your practice or retiring and you can’t find anyone. Well, your only option really is to shut up shop,” Dr Amso said.
“If you can’t sell a clinic to someone or recruit someone to cover for your leave or holiday, then you really have no option but to shut off the clinic, either temporarily or permanently in some areas in the country.”
Dr Mo Amso. RNZ / Sarah Robson
Dr Amso New Zealand had capped the number of domestically trained students to 60, and that had been the case for over 40 years.
In fact, for quite a bit of time during those 40 years, it even went down to 56, he said.
He said dentists had come from overseas to fill some of the void, but since the Covid-19 pandemic, it was harder to get more dentists in.
“We’ve simply not kept up with the pace of population growth and immigration,” Dr Amso said.
“Our population has gone from about 3.5 to over 5 million in that time frame, but we still train the same number of dentists, and what we’ve done to try and fill the gap is relied on overseas trained dentists.
“They are a wonderful cohort of our membership and of the workforce. They make up about 30 percent, about one in three dentists practising currently is overseas trained, and 50 percent of all dental specialists are overseas trained.
“But that reliance on the overseas pipeline has not always been sustainable, ad what we witnessed during Covid with the border shut for quite a while was that we were unable to pick up that workforce shortage, and I don’t think we’ve quite recovered since.”
Dr Amso said nearly 1000 people were vying for the 60 positions in the Bachelor of Dental Surgery training programme.
He said interest wasn’t an issue.
“We certainly don’t have a shortage of people who want to train as dentists. What we do have is currently 60 government-funded positions and about 40 international student positions,” Dr Amso said.
“What we do know is that the University of Otago is open to shifting that balance to having more domestically trained students to help the New Zealand workforce sector.
“What needs to happen really is a change at policy level from government to allow for that to happen.”
He said if the number of training positions was increased, so would the number of graduates.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand