University Pays Dental Students to Stay Away
The Scotsman has University pays dental students to stay away as funds crisis grows.
A SCOTTISH university is paying dental students £2,000 to delay their training, despite the country’s chronic shortage of NHS dentists.
The action by Dundee University – one of only two dental training centres in Scotland – has prompted a political row, with opposition politicians accusing the government of prolonging a crisis in NHS dentistry.
I know some dental students can be a real pain, but this is ridiculous.
The university has offered 120 school leavers places on its five-year dentistry degree course, but has authorised funding for only 67 first-years.
To avoid being financially penalised for taking on too many students, the dental school is offering the cash incentive to students who are willing to delay taking up their studies for a year.
Earlier this year, the Scottish Executive announced plans to recruit or train an additional 200 dentists by 2008. But the government, through the University Funding Council, has only provided enough cash to take on an additional 16 students at the Glasgow and Dundee dentistry schools this year.
When you get the government involved in central planning for what a free market will do naturally you get dislocations.
Another example of how socialized dental healthcare delivery systems are not good for dentists, dental students or patients.
Technorati Tags: dentistry, dental, socialized dentistry, Dundee University
2 Comments
Dave L
Some of the dental schools that I interviewed at made a big point of how they couldn’t accept more students than they had spots for in order to explain why they took a long time between accepting groups of students. One of the schools (I think it was Columbia) even said that if they were even one student over it would cause them huge problems because they only had a certain amount of lab benches, chairs, etc. Nonetheless all these schools manage to accept the right amount of students every year.
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