Doing a 2 year program would only entitle you to get 3/4 of the specialist allowance in the civil service and technically you can’t call yourself a specialist. Even in developed countries being a specialist is not just getting your 2 year postgraduate degree/training, it would take years and years of study/clinical internship for you to be acknowledged as a specialist.
Scholarships for dental postgraduate studies in the past years are scarce in comparison to our medical colleagues. Dentists in the civil service fret for not being able to secure the measly amount of scholarships given out per year. Some do get scholarships but do not get a place in university (think of Orthodontics, specialists who do braces, in Malaysia would only accept 4 candidates, 2 in Universiti of Malaya and 2 in Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia). Some who are lucky enough may get to pay (or paid by somebody else, cue mommy and daddy). To get study loans is also possible, though financing a postgraduate study in dentistry is not that cheap.
Local universities charge between RM100k to around RM160k for a 4 year clinical program. As what Universiti of Malaya is charging, a dental clinical postgraduate degree costs around RM103,816 for 4 years as of this year. Compare that with a medical postgraduate degree costs only RM10,180 for 4 years.
So it’s no wonder the amount of scholarships for dentists per year is small compared to our medical colleagues.
I can see private medical general practitioners studying for their MRCP exams while doing their locums and continue their specialist training later on, but for dentists it would be a very big sacrifice indeed.
Suddenly it makes me think that the overrated dental treatment fees are such a non-sense issue as being a dentist or dental specialist worth every penny that one could ever ask for!
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