"The ultimate aim is to produce such dental practitioners, who provide the care, including generalists and dental specialists, needed by the people," they said.
The speakers stressed on the people concerned with the educational development and delivery of care in that field, to share their responsibilities in providing remedies of dental illness in Pakistan.
CPSP President Professor Sultan Farooqui, speaking on the occasion, said in a country of 151 million with 67 percent of the population living in the rural areas, the concept of oral health and hygiene certainly deserved priority from the medical and dental communities.
Currently, the registered dental surgeons in Pakistan were 5,747, including 3,325 male, giving dentist-population ratio of dentist for a population of 26,000, which contrasted sharply with the Western scenario, where one dentist was available for every 2,000 population, he added.
To reach an optimum population-dentists ratio, he said many more needed to be added to that force.
"The number of dental specialists, registered with the Pakistan Medical and Dentistry College (PMDC), is 366, which gives a specialist population ratio of one for 409,836 population," he said.
The CPSP President said if think tanks of Pakistan did not start working on a war footing from now, the dental healthcare system might well reach near collapse by 2010, as the population was projected to be 195.1 million.
The paucity of expert dental faculty in the country needed to be remedied on an urgent footing, he said, and added reasons for the shortfall must be addressed and suitable strategies outlined.
Another matter of concern was the fact that dental colleges were mushrooming in Pakistan, having highly varying standards, which lacked the faculty and other educational resources, he said.
The world of dental and medical education was changing at a rapid rate and there was a clear shift from a teacher-oriented education system to a learner-oriented one, he said.
This transformation was being felt in Pakistan as well with some medical colleges, attempting to look at the traditional modes of education and endeavouring to bring improvements in the system, he added.
Professor Farooqui said the complete spectrum of the dental education should be streamlined and revamped according to the latest national international criteria.
"The CPSP has allocated five million rupees for research and promotion of dental education in the country and this amount will be increased to Rs 15 million in the next three months," he said.
The Dean of the Institute of Dentistry, Medical and Health Sciences of Liaquat Medical College, Jamshoro, Professor Rafique Ahmed Memon, said the postgraduate studies in dentistry were inevitable for the better health and education, but no system would work without support of all stakeholders, including examining, regulatory bodies, consumers etc.
"We must develop a system to filter interested students at various stages in a broad-based pyramid of national needs and pay them accordingly and appropriately," he added.
The Principal of Liaquat Medical College's Dentistry Institute, Dr Navid Rashid Qureshi, talked about the "Role of the private colleges in dental education," and said there was an urgent need of postgraduate faculty members in the private colleges.
"Regular revision of curriculum should be made, restructured and accredited with the continuing dental education programmes, which should be sponsored by the CPSP, dental societies or the dental colleges," he suggested. He said the resources needed to be facilitated or at least merged with the public sector and the CPSP."
Dr Syed Adnan Ali Shah stressed the need for continuous modification of the curriculum in a systematic manner, which was essential to meet the needs of future graduates, while research culture should be developed to meet the deficiency.