Health committee  The scope of practice of an oral health care provider is essentially divided into three tiers. Dental assistants and dental hygienists can provide care that is reversible. Any act that is reversible can be done at that level according to the regulations. Obviously, assistants h

Health committee  There are about 200 dental therapists who are still practising in Canada. The majority of them are practising within dental offices in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and they're providing care to children. There is no longer a training program for new therapists, so we expect that n

Health committee  We actually used to have that for children. When I grew up in Quebec, children under the age of 18 were all covered by RAMQ, and we got very good care. Saskatchewan was the pioneer in that area. It was also the first to cut back on its program. One of the impacts we see is that w

Health committee  There's no doubt dentistry is practised in isolation from the rest of the health system, but there are some very significant interfaces where dentistry is practised within the health care system. This area is mostly in two specialties, and the two specialties need surgical facil

Health committee  You talked about the correlation between a lot of periodontal disease and general health, systemic health, and that is forcing us into those areas. The model of care is changing within dental offices so that instead of treating only acute problems, we're treating chronic problems

Health committee  In regard to dentistry, over the last five years, Statistics Canada conducted a very thorough study on the needs of Canadians. The study showed that the vast majority of Canadians were receiving the care they needed. Due to the lack of public coverage for these services, a segme

Health committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Benoit Soucy the director of clinical and scientific affairs at the Canadian Dental Association. Kevin Desjardins is the director of government relations. It's our pleasure as the national representatives of Canada's dental pr

Human Resources committee  The biggest problem we have in dentistry is that, unlike medicine, we don't have a public system of care delivery. All the care is provided privately. The only place we could send a resident is to a dental school. As we were told, the deans seem to respond to cold hard cash. We

Human Resources committee  There is no shortage of dentists in Canada in numbers. There is a problem with distribution. When you get into a sparsely populated area, there simply isn't the population required to maintain a viable business. That's a huge problem in the areas that do not have dense population

Human Resources committee  As I mentioned, the approach we have chosen in dentistry is the mutual recognition agreement of accreditation systems in other counties. Setting up a specific process that would be operated from offshore is extremely difficult because of resource issues. What we have committed to

Human Resources committee  The majority of the work in dentistry is done as a consequence of the Agreement on Internal Trade. We have a one-point facility for the assessment of credentials and testing afterwards, which is the National Dental Examining Board. They have been doing that for the last 10 years

Human Resources committee  The immense majority of dentists are self-employed and the need to work with employers is not there, but there is a big need to work with the internationally trained dentists to be able to function on their own in the Canadian market,and that is something we haven't been very suc

Human Resources committee  Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, good afternoon. Bonjour. My name is Benoit Soucy. Thank you for inviting me to speak to you today about the licensure process used by Canadian dentistry. On behalf of the Canadian Dental Association, I will present to you the work done by