How much do Pakistanis Care about Oral Health?

• Published in: J. Islamic Int. Med. Coll. Vol. 10; no. 4; pp. 240 - 241
• Main Author: Muhammad Humza Bin Saeed
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Riphah International University, Islamabad 01.12.2015
• ISSN: 1815-4018; 2410-5422

When Pakistan came into being back in 1947, we had only 250 hospitals and no basic health units (BHUs) or Rural Health Centres (RHCs) at all. There were a total of 6500 doctors, out of which only 600 were 1 dentists. Today, 68 years down the line, the situation albeit not matching those of developed nations is however, much better than what it was about 7 decades ago. We have about a 1000 hospitals all over Pakistan, in addition to 5300 BHUs and about 600 RHCs. There are a total of 165,000 doctors out of 1,2 which 15000 are dentists. The reason that I have stated these statistics is to elicit the current oral health status of Pakistanis in the perspective of the health care system. What we need to understand is the fact that these 15,000 dentists are all we have to facilitate a population of about 200 million, giving a ratio of 1 dentist for 13,000 people. Let us readjust these figures to account for some practical issues. As per Tudor Hart's inverse care law which elicits the inverse relationship between the demand and supply of health needs and health professionals, we may very well appreciate the fact that the majority of these dentists are practicing in the urban areas, which house only about 30-35% of the Pakistani population. To make the situation worse, 62% of the dentists' population are female, a large proportion of whom do not even practice dentistry and those who do, generally do not prefer to work in rural areas. So, if we were to estimate that in the rural areas of Pakistan, 1 dentist serves a population of 20,000, we would not be pushing it too far.