The course will span three academic years inclusive of two semesters per year and a summer period. This will allow you to be exposed to the theory and scientific foundation of the profession and also become skilled in laboratory practice within the professional environment of the teaching laboratory in a structured manner as follows:

Course Overview

1st Year

You will receive knowledge on the normal functioning and general pathology of the human body, dental public health and oral health education. The latter will include nutritional and oral hygiene counselling and community dental health program planning, implementation, and evaluation. The principles of education and the methodology of oral health education are skills that are directly applicable and transferable to other areas of general health of our nation. In parallel, you will also learn and perform basic clinical skills in a dental skills laboratory and observe patient treatment in a dental setting. This preparatory groundwork will allow you to start practicing in summer on selected healthy patients to provide oral prophylaxis.

2nd Year

You will further develop intellectually by receiving knowledge focused on oral and dental disease. By the second year, you will be exposed to patients with more advance oral disease so as to further develop your clinical skills within the university dental teaching clinic.

3rd Year

In the final year of the course, you will be tutored on ethical and legal issues, clinical governance, and critical appraisal of dental and medical literature as a preamble to the writing of a dissertation. On the clinic front, you will consolidate your clinical skills by being exposed to the medically compromised patient. The intellectual and clinical knowledge obtained in the first two years of the course will serve as a basis for the management of these compromised patients. This year will allow you to attain and refine your intellectual and clinical proficiency, which will allow you to seek direct employment after completion of your studies

The primary objective of the course is to re-establish the profession of dental hygiene on a national level. More specifically the course will provide a sufficient body of knowledge to enable dental hygienists to undertake your prescribed work with care, safety and responsibility, and to recognise the full scope of your remit.

Therefore, the objectives of the dental hygiene course are to familiarize you with:

• Concepts of oral and general health and disease.
• Notions of public health and oral health education.
• Legal and ethical rights of patients.
• Health and safety precautions in the clinical environment.
• Critical thinking and writing skills using evidence based methodology.
• Scientific and clinical research procedures in dental disease using evidence based methodology.
• Clinical practice skills, including patient education, in the field of dental hygiene.
• Clinically acceptable indices used in treatment records in the field of oral health.
• Concepts of clinical governance in a dental practice.
• Modes of gathering and maintaining clinical records in the clinical environment.