Landmark British Dental School To Open Next Month

Thu, 04 Oct 2007

The University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) is set to open its doors to Europe’s latest dental school next month.

The school, estimated to have cost £5.25m, is one of the first new dental schools to be built in Britain for over a century and provides pupils with world-class teaching facilities, aimed at setting new standards in dental training .

Included in the dental school will be a range of state-of-the-art technologies such as a phantom head room, which will enable students to carry out practical techniques on manikin heads, and a prosthetics laboratory where they will learn to make dental appliances such as crowns and dentures .

Professor Lawrence Mair, an experienced academic and consultant in restorative dentistry, is the school’s head. "This is a very exciting time for us," he said.

"We had 181 applications for the first intake so the selection process was very competitive."

The new school, a joint venture between UCLan and the Universities of Liverpool, Lancaster and Cumbria, was designed as a response to government figures which identified the chronic need for more qualified dentists in the North West.

The universities were awarded funding from the Higher Education Funding Council to train an additional 32 students each year, with Liverpool University providing the curriculum and UCLan being put in charge of its delivery - supported by Liverpool and Consortium members.

Its main aim is to provide the North West region with a core of qualified dentists through the new four-year graduate entry course, which will offer a balance of theoretical study and practical training .

Students will spend their first year studying on campus in the new school at the University of Central Lancashire, before relocating for three years' clinical training at one of four newly-established Dental Education Centres (DECs) in Accrington, Blackpool, Carlisle and Morecambe Bay.

Professor Mair added: "The successful applicants have now started the undergraduate programme in our new purpose-built school ."

"This new school is very different from the established schools, in that we have four clinical education centres distributed around the North West rather than being confined to one location, which will allow our students to gain experience in the local communities they are most likely to serve after graduation ."
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