The Dundee Dentistry course

Dundee lists five main teaching formats: lectures, tutorials, practical laboratory sessions, workshops and clinical skills classes. On top of these you spend a growing share of your week on supervised clinics. The university's guide for school pupils who shadow a dental student describes a typical day mixing lectures, tutorials, clinical skills sessions and clinics, moving between university and NHS buildings.

A dental student writing on the university's website in 2025 describes the curriculum as a spiral. Topics come back several times, each time in more depth and closer to real patients. The module descriptions show the pattern: in year 3, bone biology and wound healing are taught alongside your first oral surgery.

The balance shifts as you move through the course. Year 1 is built around simulation, foundation science and your first supervised patients. From year 2, a large part of your timetable goes on clinical sessions across the dental specialties.

Final year is taught mainly through clinical placements in the dental hospital and at outreach clinics, in clinical groups of seven or fewer students. Lectures are gathered into three in-person lecture weeks spread across the year, with workshops that help you connect what you have learned.

Dundee's course page says you can work with Thiel cadavers. These are the bodies of people who donated them for teaching, preserved by the Thiel method. Thiel embalming keeps the body flexible, with colour and texture close to living tissue, and the body can be moved into any position. That makes it easier to see how muscles, nerves and vessels behave in a living patient than with traditionally embalmed bodies, which are firm and stiff.

The Thiel bodies are held by the university's Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification (CAHID) in the Medical Science Institute on Dow Street, on the City Campus. Its main dissecting room has 30 stations, each with a trolley, instruments and a computer. A separate teaching suite has nine bays fitted with surgical operating lights. The centre holds around 200 Thiel cadavers at any one time and also serves other courses, such as the postgraduate forensic dentistry programmes.

One dental student, writing on the university's website in 2025, says anatomy is taught through both dissection and prosection. In dissection you cut through tissue yourself; in prosection you study specimens that anatomists have already dissected to show particular structures. This is one student's account rather than a course document, so ask at an open day how much hands-on dissection dental students do.

Applied anatomy comes back throughout the course. In year 2 it underpins learning to give local anaesthetic injections, and in year 3 it supports your introduction to oral surgery.

Your first semester is spent in simulation. Module 1 builds the technical, clinical and communication skills you need, including periodontal instrumentation, which means using instruments to clean around the teeth and gums, and basic operative skills on artificial teeth. You must pass gateway exams, practical tests of your skills, before you are allowed to treat patients. Students told GDC inspectors in 2023 that once they passed, they got onto patient clinics without delay.

In the second semester of year 1, Module 2 brings you onto clinics in the dental hospital. You take patients' medical, dental and social histories, carry out routine examinations of the mouth, give advice on preventing disease and provide simple gum care. Meanwhile, back in simulation, you start using dental drills on set tasks.

Supervision is close. The GDC's 2023 report records at least one qualified supervisor for every five students on clinic, and one-to-one supervision when a student is doing surgery. A supervisor signs a permission-to-treat form once satisfied you understand the task, and checks your work at each stage. You also need clearance from NHS Occupational Health before starting clinics, and you have a skin health check every year.

Patients on the student clinics are adults who are not registered with a dentist and children under 16, all screened first to check that their needs suit a student clinic. Adult appointments usually last about 90 minutes and can run to three hours, and children's appointments about an hour, because each stage is checked. Clinics run Monday to Friday in term time. On the children's clinic you work alongside dental therapy students, who are training to become dental therapists.

Responsibility builds module by module. You place your first fillings in year 2 and start treating children and doing oral surgery in year 3. Crowns, bridges, dentures and root canal treatment begin on patients in year 3. In year 4 root canal work extends to back teeth with several roots, and you learn to use sedation for minor oral surgery.

Beyond the hospital's usual patients, the GDC noted in 2023 that staff and students take part in local and national projects to reach people who find it hard to get dental care. These include Ukrainian families, people reached through food bank projects, and people experiencing homelessness or substance use.

You are assessed throughout the course, not only at the end of each year. The university lists four main types of assessment: online multiple-choice exams, assessments of practical and clinical skills, coursework and a reflective portfolio. The portfolio is where you write about what you learned from your own clinical experiences and how you will improve.

Practical exams use a station format. In an Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) you move through a series of short timed stations, each testing a clinical or communication task in front of an examiner. The GDC's 2023 report also mentions objective structured practical examinations (OSPEs), which test hands-on skills in the same way. For exams that count towards your progress, examiners set the pass mark by judging how hard the questions are, and marking is anonymous wherever possible.

Your final exams include integrated structured clinical examinations (ISCEs). These are station exams that bring clinical knowledge, skills and communication together, sometimes with actors playing patients. The GDC watched the first ISCEs in May 2024 and found them well organised, clearly linked to its learning outcomes and fairly run.

The university's module page for final year sets out how the year is weighted. An online knowledge exam of single-best-answer and extended-matching questions, two kinds of multiple-choice question, counts for 30%. The ISCE counts for 15% and a clinical case presentation for 15%. Coursework makes up 30%: an elective report (10%), two logbook assessments (5% each) and a group exercise on professional standards (10%). A portfolio counts for the last 10%.

Your clinical work is graded continuously on LiftUpp. After each treatment you and your supervisor agree a grade called a developmental indicator, and you then write a reflection in your student log. These reflections build towards a larger reflective assessment. LiftUpp also reports how many procedures of each type you have done and how well.

A Progress Committee meets six times a year to review each student's academic and clinical performance, attendance and professionalism. Lapses in professional behaviour are recorded on a form called a Notification of Lapse of Professionalism, which carries points. More than six points means an automatic referral to the Professionalism and Capability committee.

Most of your clinical training happens in Dundee Dental Hospital and Research School, from your first patients in year 1 to consultant clinics in year 5. The hospital's eight departments cover dental accident and emergency, oral medicine, oral surgery, dental and maxillofacial radiology, special care dentistry, restorative dentistry, paediatric (children's) dentistry and orthodontics. Students regularly attend the orthodontic clinics on the fifth floor, where on staff clinics they are usually there to observe.

Outreach means treating patients in NHS clinics outside the dental hospital, so you gain experience in a different setting from the dental school. Every Dundee dental student does it. The university's current module page for final year lists seven outreach clinics: Kings Cross in Dundee, Arbroath, Perth, Cupar, Kirkcaldy, Aberdeen and Inverness. Between them they cover four NHS health boards: Tayside, Fife, Grampian and Highland.

The GDC's 2023 report lists three weeks of outreach in year 4, and the course page says outreach sessions continue through the first semester of year 5. In August 2023 NHS Shetland also ran a three-week pilot placement for six Dundee students, but Shetland is not on the university's current outreach list.

Outreach supervision matches the dental hospital, with no more than five students to each supervisor. Outreach supervisors use LiftUpp and attend an annual training day so their grading lines up with staff in Dundee. Quality checks on outreach are shared between the university and NHS Education for Scotland (NES), the NHS body responsible for education and training in Scotland. Students told GDC inspectors in 2023 that the move from hospital to outreach felt smooth, with a clear induction.

Every year includes a Discovery Week, in which you explore a topic of your own choice.

You can build on a Discovery Week topic in your elective, a period of study you plan yourself. The GDC's 2023 report places a five-week elective in the summer between years 4 and 5. The university says the elective can include travelling to see dentistry in a different culture. Afterwards you write an elective report, which counts towards your final-year coursework.

One dental student, writing on the university's website in 2024, describes the elective as self-led. You choose where to go, whether locally, elsewhere in the UK or abroad, and you arrange the placement yourself. That student advises checking whether a host country allows students to treat patients under supervision.

Outside the timetable, you can join research projects through summer internships and take part in the school's Dental Wiki project.

Intercalating means pausing your dental degree for a year to study for a separate degree, then returning to the BDS. It is optional. Dundee offers one-year intercalated BMSc (Hons) degrees, a Bachelor of Medical Sciences with honours, in subjects including Anatomy and Medical Education. Both are open to dental students who have successfully completed two years of a BDS.

Taking one adds a year, so your studies would last six years instead of five. The university says an intercalated BMSc lets you study a topic you choose in depth and learn how to plan and carry out research. If you are interested, ask the School of Dentistry how a year out fits around the BDS timetable.

Dundee Dental Hospital and Research School is a ten-storey tower on Park Place, on the City Campus, and home to the School of Dentistry. During and after the COVID-19 pandemic several floors were completely refitted. Enclosed treatment pods were installed so that aerosol-generating procedures, such as drilling with high-speed instruments that throw a fine spray into the air, can be done safely. The school also has a simulation laboratory with phantom heads.

The school's research includes the Dental Health Services Research Unit and projects on the oral health of people experiencing homelessness, people in prison and people who use drugs. Summer research internships, mentioned in the electives section, are one way to get involved.

Module 1 is designed for students arriving from a range of backgrounds, and it focuses on the move to independent study. So the first semester teaches you how to learn as a student professional as well as what to learn.

Feedback is built into clinics. Your supervisor discusses every treatment with you before you agree your LiftUpp grade. The 2025 student account also describes working on clinic in teams alongside more experienced students.

Each year group has a student representative who collects feedback and sits on school committees. Students told GDC inspectors in 2023 that the school acts on their feedback and explains its reasons when it cannot.

The Progress Committee that reviews your performance is also where extra support is agreed for students who need it. GDC inspectors saw examples of adjustments made for disabled students.