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Dental workforce planning in Sri Lanka

Dental workforce planning in Sri Lanka
Dental workforce planning in Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka is a developing South Asian country which provides free education and healthcare for all its citizens. This thesis presents a policy-oriented study, partly empirical and partly modelling, whose aim was to understand dental care provision and workforce planning, at a time where Sri Lanka?s dental health policies appear to have failed to achieve their intended results, leading to a mismatch between supply and demand, i.e. “underemployment and unemployment” of trained dental surgeons, despite an increasing need for dental care within the population. The first section of this thesis describes a novel method of collecting primary data on Sri Lanka?s dental health professionals, in a challenging setting where there was no existing database. The thesis also presents a methodology to convert need for dental care to demand for care, adapting an existing model developed by the World Health Organization and the Federation Dentaire Internationale to suit the Sri Lankan setting. Finally, this section of the thesis describes a survey to identify the “timings” taken for various dental treatment modalities in Sri Lanka. The second section of the thesis presents a System Dynamics model, which uses the data obtained from these empirical surveys, to address dental workforce planning issues in Sri Lanka. The model is then used to simulate various different scenarios, generating realistic, practical and insightful lessons for policy making. Based on the results of this model, in 2011 the Government of Sri Lanka took steps to deal with the “employment mismatch” issue by restricting the annual intake of dental students and by creating 400 new Government-funded posts over the following two years.
De Silva, Maduwage
9e68bebe-9b31-4773-9222-10ce056e32f8
De Silva, Maduwage
9e68bebe-9b31-4773-9222-10ce056e32f8
Brailsford, S.C.
634585ff-c828-46ca-b33d-7ac017dda04f

De Silva, Maduwage (2012) Dental workforce planning in Sri Lanka. University of Southampton, School of Management, Doctoral Thesis, 253pp.

Record type: Thesis (Doctoral)

Abstract

Sri Lanka is a developing South Asian country which provides free education and healthcare for all its citizens. This thesis presents a policy-oriented study, partly empirical and partly modelling, whose aim was to understand dental care provision and workforce planning, at a time where Sri Lanka?s dental health policies appear to have failed to achieve their intended results, leading to a mismatch between supply and demand, i.e. “underemployment and unemployment” of trained dental surgeons, despite an increasing need for dental care within the population. The first section of this thesis describes a novel method of collecting primary data on Sri Lanka?s dental health professionals, in a challenging setting where there was no existing database. The thesis also presents a methodology to convert need for dental care to demand for care, adapting an existing model developed by the World Health Organization and the Federation Dentaire Internationale to suit the Sri Lankan setting. Finally, this section of the thesis describes a survey to identify the “timings” taken for various dental treatment modalities in Sri Lanka. The second section of the thesis presents a System Dynamics model, which uses the data obtained from these empirical surveys, to address dental workforce planning issues in Sri Lanka. The model is then used to simulate various different scenarios, generating realistic, practical and insightful lessons for policy making. Based on the results of this model, in 2011 the Government of Sri Lanka took steps to deal with the “employment mismatch” issue by restricting the annual intake of dental students and by creating 400 new Government-funded posts over the following two years.

Text
Final PhD thesis - De Silva, Dileep.pdf - Other
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More information

Published date: August 2012
Organisations: University of Southampton, Southampton Business School

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 354407
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/354407
PURE UUID: 9cc7a7c4-8142-4a49-98be-2972288ad24d
ORCID for S.C. Brailsford: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-6665-8230

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 21 Oct 2013 10:28
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 02:42

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Contributors

Author: Maduwage De Silva
Thesis advisor: S.C. Brailsford ORCID iD

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