ABSTRACT
Most undergraduate regulatory bodies are currently recommending that students should experience sufficient exposure to technical training to be able to prescribe a full range of crowns, bridges and dentures (GDC, 1997). Whether students should ever need to construct a set of complete dentures in the future is contentious. The number of edentulous patients is declining in many countries: from 30 per cent in 1968 to around 13 per cent in 2001 in the United Kingdom (Royal Society of Edinburgh, 2001). If the demand for the provision of complete dentures becomes low, Bertolami (2001) argues that postgraduate dental specialists should carry them out. An alternative would be to delegate this to specially trained clinical technicians. Even if the dental student performs the routine clinical aspects of constructing dentures, it is doubtful that they would ever have to carry out the technical aspects and so would not need to pursue the technical methodology, in any great depth. The ‘core’ focus in the prosthetic field for dental undergraduate education must therefore be history and examination, diagnosis and clinical stages of denture construction, rather than technical processes.
