The Cardiff Dentistry courseWhat you actually study, and where you will be
Photo: Jeremy Segrott (from Cardiff, Wales, UK) / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.0 · cropped
Photo: Jeremy Segrott from Cardiff, Wales, UK · CC BY 2.0 · Photo: Armonjones · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Photo: M J Richardson · CC BY-SA 2.0
The Cardiff dentistry course at a glance
Based in the University Dental Hospital, with a £2.2 million simulation suite of phantom heads before you touch a patient. From year 4 you go out on primary care placements in and around Cardiff and across Wales.
How Cardiff teaches dentistry
Years 2 to 5 are spent largely in the School of Dentistry, developing knowledge through lectures, seminars and clinical skills sessions, with simulated clinical activities building into a growing patient list.
What that means day to day
When you first treat patients
Students see their first patient under the close supervision of an experienced dental professional, then start to build their own list. Year 3 grows that list; year 4 adds primary care placements.
Year by year at Cardiff
Where you will actually be at Cardiff
Placement geography is the part of a dentistry course that changes your life most and appears in prospectuses least. Here is what Cardiff publishes.
Outreach facilities across Wales provide wide-ranging clinical exposure. On placement students are supported by an experienced clinical lead.
- University Dental Hospital
Worth knowing about Cardiff
- Clinical skills are practised in a £2.2 million dental simulation suite on mannequins known as "phantom heads".
Applying to Cardiff?
How to get into Cardiff
Entry requirements, UCAT, personal statement and interview, step by step.
Open the guide →Cardiff UCAT cut-offs and offers
UCAT cut-offs, A-level offers, interview format and decision dates.
See the requirements →Compare Cardiff with other schools
Put the teaching style, anatomy teaching and placements next to another school.
Open the comparison →Prepare for the Cardiff interview
Format breakdown, school-specific sample questions and prep tips from tutors who interviewed here.
Read the guide →Where this Cardiff course profile came from
Cardiff University School of Dentistry's course page could not be read directly by our tooling — it either sits behind a bot wall or renders in the browser — so this page was built from the university's own published course and school pages, checked on 2026-09-11. Confirm the detail against the official page before you rely on it.
Primary source: Cardiff University School of Dentistry — official course information.
Courses are restructured between cycles. Anything here that decides your application — an anatomy offer, a placement city, a compulsory intercalated year — should be confirmed against the official page for your entry year.
Applying to Cardiff?
We have helped hundreds of applicants turn their UCAT, personal statement and interview prep into offers from Cardiff and other UK dentistry schools.