Orthodontic Manpower Crisis Looming?

I recently attended the BOS Trustees meeting and was surprised to learn that, for half a dozen senior registrar jobs, there were only two or three applicants. This is not the first time that training posts have been left unfilled, and this certainly does not bode well for the future. All of the stakeholders involved, either directly or indirectly, in training the next generation of specialists: the Postgraduate Deans, the SAC and the Consultant Orthodontic Group, urgently need to find out from the Training Grades Group what would make these training posts much more attractive.

To avert this impending crisis we certainly need to think of innovative ways of making the Senior Registrar posts more accessible and more attractive to the many young specialists who are completing their basic specialty training, so that we do not lose this entire pool of talent to the undeniable lures of specialist practice.

I ran the very first couple of part-time training courses in Manchester when I was Training Programme director in the 1990s. These were incredibly well received by the successful applicants and involved training three days a week over a four-year period. A similar model has already been successfully run at Senior Registrar level and perhaps we should be positively encouraging trainees to follow this model. They would have the opportunity to sample life in specialist practice as well as learning to treat the more complex multidisciplinary cases. The quality of the overall training should be far superior to the traditional 2-year programme, due to the longitudinal nature of orthodontic treatment.