Scientometric Analysis of Teaching Geriatric Dentistry in Institutions of Higher Education: A Global Perspective

Introduction

Teaching geriatric dentistry as a sub-field of medicine will continue to witness more recognition and remarkable dimensions as technology advances, ageing process continues, variants of diseases emerge, and perception on how to tackle and care for elderly people’s challenges manifests. This is true, as the World Health Organziation (1972) cited in Shah, (2009, p. 20) reiterated “education is inextricably interwoven with the health services system”, which is more critical in the field of geriatric dentistry where the health of patients and community are tied closely with the education of health professionals. Similarly, graduates are expected to have the mastery of elderly people’s health needs, which encompass experience of growing old, knowledge of social, psychological, and economic aspects of becoming old, etc., absence of which can tantamount to committing errors immediately followed with many consequences (Shah, 2009). Furthermore, education involves in-depth theoretical knowledge, clinical skills, and behavioural management of patients, which require students to possess communication, knowledge, technical skills, clinical reasoning, etc. for taking good care of patients (Shah, 2009). Unfortunately, at present, the global population of dentists is not more than 1.6 million personnel where 67% of the Member States report that 5 dentists serve 10 000 population (with 37% indicate to have less than 1) (World Health Organization, 2023). Perhaps this meagre number of dentists is one of the reasons why teachers at primary school who constituted about 23.9 million personnel globally are thought to be the best instruments to instil healthy preventive oral habits through imparting lessons on hygiene to infants and students in schools (Reddy et al., 2019). Despite this strong strategy, in 2019, World Oral Day campaign reached out only to 2.8 billion people globally (FDI, 2019), which is less than ½ of the world population. This occurs despite oral diseases pose serious chronic diseases with public concerns because of their prevalence, cost of treatment, and impact on individual and society (WHO, 2023). To bring to the limelight of audience, dental care system in most countries does not have the needed infrastructure to cope with the demands of oral healthcare, which challenges them to come up with machineries capable of formulating strategies to integrate oral health with general health policies (WHO, 2023). For instance, in Africa, only 30% of the countries have national oral policies with many countries left behind due to lack of resources (FDI, 2019). To concur with this fact, in the pre-COVID-19 pandemic, FDI organized an exhibition where 678 exhibitors from across the world participated out of which 598 were from U.S., and the remaining 80 from other parts of the world (FDI, 2019).

To commensurate with the above realities, many researchers recognized that, prevention of diseases, disability, and suffering is always at the forefront of many governments’ agendas for providing decent quality of life to citizens (Nakre & Harikiran, 2013). To be precise, the main objective of oral health education is to improve knowledge, an ingredient required for adopting favourable oral health behaviors or practice that could ensure preventive, restorative, and emergency dental care (Nakre & Harikiran, 2013). This is attested to as the oral health education “has been delivered to individuals and groups in settings such as dental practice, schools, the workplace, and day-care and residential settings for older adults” (Habbu & Krishnappa, 2015, p. 57). To be in accord with this submission, in India, as 2016 statistics showed, even though there was discrepancy in the exact number, there were 310 dental colleges with 292 owned by private and only 40 run by the government distributed across states. States such as Karnataka have more dental colleges than Bihar, Gujarat, which affects the distribution of dentists in those states. As in 1970, there were only 8000 and in 2010, 30570 graduates from Indian colleges (Yadav & Rawal, 2016).