By Amresh Gunasingham

THE next time Jasmine Aw, 18, wants a routine dental checkup, it may be her friend Fang Yi who scales, polishes and cleans her teeth, in a clinic on her school campus.

Nanyang Polytechnic (NYP) has set up a Teaching Dental Clinic costing $600,000 to train final-year students in its three-year diploma programme in Dental Hygiene and Therapy. It opened its doors in October this year.

Under the supervision of qualified dentists, students like Fang Yi, 21, will learn to perform simple procedures such as polishing, scaling and taking X-rays of teeth.

When the 22 third-year students graduate next year, they will become qualified oral health therapists, permitted to practise in both private and public dental settings.

Currently, second- and final-year students receive vocational training treating children aged six to 18 years at the Health Promotion Board's (HPB) School Dental Centre.

They also treat adults at the National Dental Centre.

But the training limits students to learning clinical skills, said Dr Hemalatha Nathan, manager of NYP's School of Health Sciences and a visiting consultant at the National Dental Centre.

Speaking at a tour of the polytechnic's Teaching Dental Clinic yesterday, she said the campus facility would also train students in management skills such as appointment scheduling, inventory taking and even simple maintenance of dental equipment.

'At private clinics, therapists are expected to fulfil a number of roles. This training will ensure students are better equipped,' said Dr Nathan.

By next year, 124 students would have graduated from the only such course here, which was started in 2003.

More than half the graduates have gone on to seek employment in private practices, said Dr Nathan. Before the Dental Registration Act, which came into force in January this year, dental therapists could be employed only by the HPB's School Dental Service.

But last year, Health Minister Khaw Boon Wan said that dental treatment costs could be drastically reduced if clinics used oral health therapists - rather than dentists - to perform simple clinical procedures. For example, scaling procedures at the National Dental Centre cost around $80 if performed by a dentist and $33 if done by an oral health therapist.

The NYP clinic also offers students and staff simple dental cleaning procedures capped at an affordable rate of $7.

Final-year student Fang Yi said the training would improve her prospects of working in a private clinic.

This article was first published in The Straits Times on December 31, 2008.