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Addressing oral health inequalities in Malawi: The MalDent project mission of ‘oral health for all’

Author(s): Infodent International

The College Director of Global Health, Professor Jeremy Bagg, writes about the College’s involvement in the MalDent project, establishing a degree programme for Dental Surgery in Malawi and developing a national Oral Health Policy in the country.

“Venerable Mother Toothache Climb down from the white battlements, Stop twisting in your yellow fingers The fourfold rope of nerves”

So wrote the English poet John Heath-Stubbs in his piece ‘A Charm against the Toothache’ in 1954. As many of us can attest from personal experience, dental pain can be excruciating and, if untreated, can have serious or even life-threatening consequences. This poses a serious challenge in Malawi, whose population of 19.5 million citizens is currently served by only 43 dentists, most of whom work in private practice in the cities, even though more than 80% of the population live in rural villages and have little disposable income. The provision of dental care in rural areas falls largely to dental therapists, of whom there are approximately 100 in public service, but this very small workforce, which is often poorly resourced, cannot begin to address the treatment needs. As a result, most Malawians have no access to professional dental care, but the limited available oral health survey data indicate a very large burden of untreated oral and dental disease. It was against this backdrop that in 2016 Dr Mwapatsa Mipando, then the Principal of the University of Malawi College of Medicine, reached out to the University of Glasgow (UofG) for advice on establishing a Bachelor of Dental Surgery degree programme, so that Malawi could begin to train its own dentists. That was the beginning of a close partnership between the two organisations that became the MalDent Project (www.themaldentproject.com).

The MalDent Project is a collaboration between the Kamuzu University of Health Sciences (KUHeS -formerly the University of Malawi College of Medicine) and the University of Glasgow Dental School, generously funded by Scottish Government International Development. However, from the outset it has been a......READ MORE

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