Perspectives on dental education in mainland China

The Chinese dental education system has undergone major changes over the past three decades. Although a number of approaches have been adopted for the modification of the dental curriculum, the greatest challenge remains as to how to develop enough qualified dentists to meet the dental care needs of China's 1.3 billon population. In many areas the limited funds have been mainly used for the enhancement of academic status while the clinical training programmes for the improvement of practical skills of the clinicians has been greatly neglected. In addition, the discrepancies in the distribution of dental resources have been increasingly alarming and have the tendency toward becoming even more serious in the future. The aim of this review is to describe dental education in China in the hope that more favourable changes could take place and the system itself could be further optimised.