The Evolving Chinese Dental Education-A Brief Introduction To The Xiangya Model Of A "5+3" Consecutive Dental Programme

In 2015, the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China (PRC) issued the notice about "Renovating the 7-year MD & Master's degree clinical medical programme into a new '5+3' consecutive program". After that, 10 qualified seven-year dental schools recruited fresh high school graduates into this revolutionized system. The students who are already in the seven-year programme from these schools can freely choose to switch to the master's degree phase training by participating into a designated three-year standardized resident training programme. According to the National Health and Family Planning Commission of China (NHFPC), the new "5+3" format differs from the traditional medical profession pathway which starts with a clinical bachelor's degree (5 years) then a clinical master's degree (3 years). In the past, the five-year programme students needed to finish their training before took the National Postgraduate Entrance Examination (NPEE) to join the 3 years master's degree programme. On the contrary, students in the new "5+3" consecutive programme are guaranteed to move onto the master's degree phase by meeting the bachelor's degree requirements during their first 5 years. They are expected to meet all the master's degree criteria as well as completing the national resident standardization training in their last 3 years of training. Much work is still needed from individual schools to formulate adequate curriculum. However, the revolutionary system promoted by the government represents China's determination to tackle the current challenges in the medical/dental system. In this article, we briefly reviewed the evolving Chinese Dental Educational System and summarized the pioneer work accomplished by our school in the past few years. We aim to cultivate a new generation of Chinese dentists with strong clinical skills and fundamental research ability, via rigorous clinical, social science, natural science training.