Dental workforce planning in Sri Lanka

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.

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ORCID for S.C. Brailsford: orcid.org/0000-0002-6665-8230

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