Garreco recently donated product to MCW’s Oral Health Care Program to support long-term sustainability for Tanzania’s MUHAS Dental School. With donations such as this, the school will now be able to establish a faculty and graduate clinic which will continue to contribute to the school’s sustainability.

ABOUT MUHAS DENTAL SCHOOL

The School of Dentistry is one of the five schools of the Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences (MUHAS) which became a fully-fledged University in 2007. The school started as a Division of Dentistry within the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Dar-es-Salaam in 1979, after a felt need for production of Tanzanian dentists who were suitably trained to address oral health problems of Tanzanians. Currently the dentist: population ratio in Tanzania is about 1:120,000 people compared to a ratio of 1:7,500 people that is recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) in developing countries.

The School of Dentistry was inaugurated in 1979, therefore, the first batch of the Doctor of Dental Surgery (DDS) program graduated in 1984. The School has three departments – The Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, the Department of Orthodontics, Pedodontics and Community Dentistry and the Department of Restorative Dentistry. Postgraduate (MDent) programs started in 1986 whereby the first batch graduated in 1989. The postgraduate programs were then frozen until 2002 when they were re-started. Currently, the School of Dentistry is running one undergraduate and four postgraduate programs. The postgraduate programs are Mdent (Oral and maxillofacial surgery) Mdent (Restorative Dentistry), MDent (Community Dentistry) and MDent (Paediatric Dentistry). All programs in the School are following competency-based curricula that incorporate other non-knowledge and non-skill competences to impart more of attitude values desirable to clinicians in the field of dentistry. These competencies are relationship with patient/client, relationship with colleagues, teaching skills, maintaining good practice, systems-based practice, and professionalism. Adding up to the other two traditional competencies: professional knowledge and clinical skills makes a total of eight MUHAS competences. The teaching and assessment methods have also been intensely revised, diversified and improved to line-up with these competencies. The School’s clinical rooms and laboratory for the teaching of students and clinical services to patients were refurbished a few years ago to make it one of the dental schools with the best facilities in the region.

To learn more about the MUHAS Dental School in Tanzania, please visit their website at sod.muhas.ac.tz.