Dental public health, known in Iran as Community Oral Health, is the branch of dentistry devoted to preventing oral disease and promoting oral health at the population level. Instead of filling a single cavity, the discipline integrates policy-making, epidemiologic assessment, and resource management to protect entire communities. That makes high-quality undergraduate education in the field essential: every dentist who graduates without a solid grounding in population-based prevention becomes another practitioner in a treatment-oriented system. Yet the evidence suggests Iranian graduates have been underprepared, with an outdated curriculum, inconsistent national implementation, and insufficient infrastructure and funding undermining the field for years.

To confront the problem head-on, Iranian dental educators organized three national symposia titled Evaluating the Educational Status of DPH in Iran, held between 2019 and 2023. The initiative came from the Secretariat of the Dental Education Council of the Ministry of Health and was organized by the Iranian Association of Community Oral Health, university DPH departments, the Research Center for Caries Prevention, and the Department of DPH at Tehran University of Medical Sciences. Each gathering brought together 40 to 50 participants, including DPH specialists, department heads, PhD students, and dental school representatives, all invited through official channels to ensure broad and representative involvement.

The first symposium, held in person at Tehran University of Medical Sciences in April 2019, used a structured, participatory consultation and consensus-building process. After an opening presentation on the role of DPH departments in dental education, participants worked through multiple rounds of facilitated group discussions, with ideas recorded in real time on shared whiteboards and in facilitator notes. The organizing team consolidated the input by grouping similar contributions and removing duplicates, then refined the results through further brainstorming until consensus emerged. That process distilled the challenges into five domains: infrastructure, budget and service delivery; workforce development and management; curriculum design; community-centric research; and community engagement and outreach. Participants then formed domain-specific working groups whose proposed solutions were presented in plenary sessions, refined through collective feedback, and finalized the following day.

The second symposium, held virtually in October 2020, and the third, held in person in July 2023, revisited those findings and prioritized three domains for reform based on perceived impact, feasibility, and alignment with national needs: infrastructure strengthening, workforce development, and community engagement. The 2023 meeting also featured a training workshop for DPH educators, and participant databases and virtual groups were created afterward to sustain dialogue and resource sharing between events. The multi-year, iterative design gave the process a durability that one-off conferences rarely achieve, allowing recommendations to be tested and sharpened across changing circumstances, including the disruptions of a global pandemic.

On infrastructure, the symposia identified concrete and surprisingly practical gaps. DPH programs struggle with scarce fluoride varnish supplies, transportation difficulties reaching community course sites, and low patient referrals to dental schools, alongside province-specific problems such as oral cancer in Sistan and Baluchestan and molar-incisor hypomineralization in Ardabil. The proposed fixes include memorandums of understanding between the Ministry of Health and dental school departments to secure resources, referral pathways from schools to DPH departments with lower tariffs, insurance contracts, and patient databases maintained by DPH PhD students. To match local needs, the participants recommended agreements between DPH departments and provincial health deputies, tailored initiatives such as oral cancer screening in the hardest-hit provinces, and the introduction of Family Dentistry to give students genuine community-based experience.

The workforce picture is equally stark. Iran has too few DPH departments nationwide, low appeal of the specialty among dental students, a shortage of experts below the national goal of one DPH PhD student per school or province by 2025, underuse of PhD students in teaching, and limited cross-specialty collaboration. The solutions draw on a hub model in which ten regional lead universities share faculty and resources with nearby schools, short competency-building courses for other specialties, dual degrees with pediatrics, periodontics, and restorative dentistry, funded PhD places for top students, and expanded career paths through oral health committees and Ministry of Health service contracts. Senior PhD students past their comprehensive examinations would serve as teaching assistants, multiplying scarce faculty capacity.

Curriculum reform rounds out the agenda. Participants called for integrating the oral health needs of patients with special health care needs into DPH and other specialties’ curricula, inviting such patients directly into dental schools, and establishing dedicated committees and fellowships. Teaching improvements include nationwide educator-training workshops, three to four standardized course models to address limited hours and transportation, and practical checklists for hands-on courses. Assessment would shift toward higher-level exam questions aligned with course objectives, with part of the final grade devoted to practical application, and evaluation would rely on systematic stakeholder feedback through dialogue, surveys, and specialized forms. The establishment of the Iranian DPH board in 2022 provides an institutional anchor for these changes, while research reforms would tie postgraduate thesis topics to Ministry of Health needs assessments and translate findings into policy briefs.

What makes the Iranian experience resonate far beyond its borders is how closely its challenges mirror global patterns. In Egypt, limited postgraduate training has left DPH teaching largely to pediatric dentistry faculty, and community-based training is used by only about a quarter of schools. Across Europe, only about two-thirds of dental schools have dedicated DPH departments, and outreach accounts for a mere 11 percent of teaching, often cited as good practice rather than routine. Colombia and Kenya have no dedicated DPH track, Brazil offers only three programs, and India’s community outreach remains insufficiently structured. Iran’s difficulties, in other words, are not an outlier but a symptom of how prevention is undervalued in dental systems worldwide, where clinical and specialty-based dentistry traditionally outranks public health in prestige and resources.

The commentary is candid about its limitations. The insights emerged from discussions among academic and institutional stakeholders rather than empirical measurement, participation was invitation-based and may have introduced selection bias, and the influence of senior participants on group consensus cannot be excluded. The findings are also shaped by Iran’s specific educational and policy context. Still, the multi-year process and participation from across the country lend the recommendations breadth and credibility. Progress, the authors suggest, can be tracked through tangible indicators: the number of newly established DPH departments, competency-based DPH modules, and expanded community-based training opportunities, with periodic stakeholder reviews to monitor reform. If those measures take hold, Iran could offer a replicable blueprint for any country wrestling with the same quiet crisis in dental public health education, and its dentists could finally be equipped to treat the causes of oral disease, not just the symptoms.

Subject of Research: Reform of undergraduate dental public health education in Iran based on national consensus symposia

Article Title: Strengthening undergraduate dental public health education in Iran: insights from national symposia

Article References: Varmazyari, S., Eshrati, M., Hessari, H., & Khami, M. R. (2026). Strengthening undergraduate dental public health education in Iran: insights from national symposia. BMC Medical Education, 26(1), Article 1570. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10474-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10474-6

Keywords: dental public health, dental education, Iran, oral health, curriculum reform, workforce development, community engagement, health policy, medical education, consensus-building, prevention, BMC Medical Education