A group of dentists yesterday held a march in Taipei, urging the government to amend laws to reduce the maximum number of dentist interns with overseas degrees and not allow non-licensed dentistry graduates who received education overseas to apply for a rural area healthcare program.
The protest was organized by the Taiwan General Dental Practitioners Association (TGDPA) and Taiwan Dentist Alliance (本土小牙醫聯盟), with hundreds of dentists wearing lab coats and other supporters taking part.
TGDPA in a statement said it demands the Ministry of Health and Welfare to reassess its NT$2.4 billion (US$73.64 million) rural area healthcare improvement program and not allow non-licensed overseas dentistry graduates to apply.
Photo: Chen Yi-kuan, Taipei Times
Overseas dentistry graduates’ eligibility to participate in the national examination for dentist licenses should be strictly reviewed, it said.
It also demanded a cap be imposed on the number of dental interns in the nation, with the percentage of interns who studied dentistry overseas not exceeding 10 percent of domestic graduates.
To achieve that, the Physicians Act (醫師法) should be amended, it said.
A total of 391 students enroll in dentistry departments in Taiwan each year, and while an ideal teacher to student ratio for clinical sessions is 1:1 or 1:2, the government sets it at 1:4, allowing 50 overseas graduates to become interns, said Wang Tong-mei (王東美), an associate professor at National Taiwan University’s Department of Dentistry.
The high number of overseas interns and the workload they bring on teachers might affect the quality of training, she said.
Unlike domestic interns, there is no mechanism to test and fail overseas interns, she added.
Phase two of the ministry’s rural area healthcare improvement program would allow foreign educated graduates to apply for it even if they have not done any internship or passed a dental license exam, Taiwan Dentist Alliance chairperson Huang Ying-chi (黃映綺) said.
There could be as many as 100 overseas educated interns in Taiwan each year, she said.
The program says it would provide dental service to 55 rural areas that have no dentists, but in fact they only lack dental clinics, as more than half of them have dental stations and mobile medical services, she said.
Data from the past 15 years show that since Taiwan began recognizing academic credentials from foreign dentistry departments, more than 80 percent of overseas educated interns remained in the country’s six special municipalities, lower than the rate of local dental graduates.
In Taiwan, dentists holding foreign degrees are commonly called “Popo doctors/dentists,” (波波醫生) as most of them studied in Poland after the country joined EU in 2004 and started English-language degree programs in medical sciences.
Over the past few years, Taiwanese have also completed the medical or dental programs in other European countries such as the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania.
The International Dental Union Alumni Association said the graduation rate of Taiwan’s dentistry departments is 100 percent, while it is only 50 to 60 percent in many foreign dentistry or medical departments, so going abroad to study dentistry is not “buying credentials.”
The overseas dentistry graduates also need to go through similar examinations and training as domestic graduates and they also need to obtain a dentist license in Taiwan, it said.
The Taiwan Dentist Alliance should stop “smearing and bullying” them, it said.
Additional reporting by Chen Chia-yi
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