Dr. Dympna Kavanagh:

Yes, absolutely. I welcome those points and an opportunity to talk about that. We worked closely with the Dental Council. Indeed, it set up a separate working policy group to work with us, particularly around the areas of education and training. We are proud of our graduates. They are fit for practice. It is important to say they hold their own among all of the European graduates.

However, what was clear, indeed, in our consultation that came back from the dentists, was that they want primary care at the heart of it and, as Professor O'Connell articulated, they want to have more exposure to practice and all those areas of managing one's own practice in primary care right through their graduate programme, and those who we asked were not necessarily convinced that what is being proposed in "foundation training", as it was then called, would rectify their problems. In fact, the older graduates said that they were still having problems. That is why we started to look at it moving more towards a mentoring programme, which, I suppose, is a super extension of that programme.

Let us focus on the specialist side of it because that is an important area. The Irish Committee for Specialist Training in Dentistry, which is the formal recognised group over specialist training and part of the Dental Council, has welcomed this policy in writing and is very supportive of it. We have already started working with the Dental Council and the Institut Spécialisé en Technologie D'Art Dentaire, ISTD, to put in place advanced centres of care. That involves not only a name. That involves credentialling, looking at the work and at the workforce we need at all the different levels. Specialists in dentistry in Ireland, and, indeed, in Europe, are different from those in medicine in that they are independent practitioners. That adds a different dimension to our workforce. Unlike in medicine, it does not mean that one automatically jumps into consultancy. We have this firm grade in between. This is a piece of work and they are well placed to lead in it. In fact, they have done a tremendous amount of work already to prepare for specialisation and for the advanced centres of care coming through. When we talk about it being a five-year plan, this is a priority - education and training, mentoring, and then moving forward into the advanced centres of care and credentialling those. This is a key piece of work with the Dental Council. We have met already and the working group will start to get going in July on it. We want to start commissioning, certainly early next year, a look at our undergraduate training in the first instance. We have so much groundwork done on the specialisation. There is great leadership there. We hope that we are in a strong position to move them in parallel.