Makerere University Re-opens its Dental School after two months of closure

Makerere University has added more equipment in its dental school making it one of the best laboratories in the region. The addition of equipment in the dental school came after it was closed two months ago as it cloud not meet the standards.

Admission of students into university dental courses had also been stopped as a result of poor standards of the facility and failure by the management to recruit enough lecturers.

The University dental school was then relocated from Mulago to the main campus opposite Guild office.

“We allocated funds that enabled the transformation of Don Bosco Annex into a dental clinic with an increased capacity for 22 dental chairs,” he Prof Barnabas Nawangwe said.

“We also allocated an extra 11 dental chairs to beef up the existing capacity, hence doubling the number of dental chairs”.

As per the report of July 3, the joint council ordered Makerere to close its dental department at the Mulago-based College of Health Sciences.

Among the recommendations given to the council was that the University should redistribute the already admitted students for the September 2019 intake to other dental schools in the region over failure to meet the minimum requirements.

According to Makerere University management at that time, the school was in poor state but subsequently launched an emergency task force to facilitate the refurbishment of the school.

Dr. Muhammad Kiggundu, the Manager Communications and International Relations at Makerere also said that the students need quality education and this can only be achieved if the demands of Makerere are fulfilled.

“It is imperative that the Makerere meets these demands. Our aim has always been to make sure that the quality of education that we offer students is second to none”, he said.

“This new facility will enable us to train students with world class facilities – comparable with the best which are available in the world. The facilities were designed to duplicate the conditions which the students will experience in their clinical years. They will also use exactly the same type and quality of equipment.

Some of the top class equipment found in the clinical wards include dental drills, operating light.

“See, all those, it is clear that the Makerere Dental School now offers one of the most advanced dental training facilities on the African continent and akin to anything we have seen around the world,” Dr. Muhammad Kiggundu concluded.