The Queen's University Belfast Dentistry course

The course is modular: each year is made up of modules with published credits and assessment weightings. Years 1 and 2 pair science modules with a clinical and professional skills module each year. From year 3 the modules follow the dental disciplines. These are conservation (fillings, crowns and root canal treatment), periodontics (gum disease), prosthetics (dentures), orthodontics (straightening teeth), oral surgery and oral medicine, and paediatric and special care dentistry.

Special care dentistry means treating people with disabilities, mental health conditions or complex medical needs. It is taught alongside paediatric dentistry in years 3, 4 and 5, with a case study of a patient with special needs in year 4.

The balance shifts as you go. In years 1 and 2 you study the biomedical and behavioural sciences alongside core clinical skills, which you practise in the Clinical Techniques Laboratory. From year 3 more of your learning happens in supervised clinics, and final year centres on patient care in the dental school and outreach clinics. Feedback on practical and clinical work is given face to face and recorded on an e-portfolio, a running digital record of your progress.

Anatomy is taught as a full-year, 40-credit module in year 1 called Anatomy for Dentistry. It starts with anatomical language and an overview of bones, muscles and joints, then covers the chest, the abdomen and the nervous system in general terms. Most of the detail is on the head and neck, which is where you will work as a dentist.

Head and neck topics include the bones of the skull, face and neck, the brain, spinal cord and cranial nerves, and the blood vessels and lymph nodes of the region. You also study the throat, voice box and thyroid, the jaw joint and chewing muscles, the eye socket, nose, sinuses, mouth and salivary glands, the ear, and how the face develops in the embryo. The module is assessed 40% by coursework and 60% by exam.

The module works with cadavers and anatomical specimens, and you are expected to treat them with respect and keep their identity confidential. You build dissection skills where specimens allow, which also trains the manual dexterity you need for clinical work. The Centre for Dentistry lists two refurbished gross anatomy laboratories in the Medical Biology Centre among its facilities.

Microscopic anatomy sits in the year 1 Biomedical Sciences for Dentistry module. It covers the fine structure of body tissues, the oral mucosa (the lining of the mouth) and how teeth form and grow. In year 2 you return to anatomy when you learn the nerves and structures involved in giving local anaesthetic injections.

Queen's says you have the chance to take part in clinical practice from year 1. The year 1 skills module teaches communication and history-taking in a simulated clinical setting, including how to advise patients on cleaning their teeth. You practise pulse, blood pressure, resuscitation (CPR) and hand-washing, and start basic operative work, such as polishing and cutting simple cavities, in the Clinical Techniques Laboratory.

Year 2 moves on to phantom heads. You prepare and fill each standard type of cavity, known as Class I to Class V, using silver-coloured amalgam and tooth-coloured composite and glass-ionomer fillings. You also learn to place a rubber dam, a thin sheet that isolates the tooth being treated, and to avoid injuring the cheeks, lips and tongue. After practical demonstrations you join a clinical attachment in which you give local anaesthetic in a clinical setting.

Every UK dental school must make sure you have shown the necessary skills in a pre-clinical setting, such as the simulation lab, before you treat patients. This is one of the requirements in the GDC's Standards for Education. The GDC's 2025 report describes how Queen's does it. Before you move onto patients you must pass Structured Clinical Operative Tasks (SCOTs), tests of set dental procedures carried out in simulation, along with other practical competencies. From year 3 you must also pass simulation tests in professional tooth cleaning and root canal treatment before doing either on a patient.

In year 3 the patients become your own, starting in the Restorative Clinic. By years 4 and 5 you provide the full range of treatment for your own adult and child patients, in the dental school and in outreach clinics. Final year adds consultant-led clinic rotations and more complex cases.

The school described its safety routine to the GDC in 2025: structured clinical induction, daily safety huddles and regular training in infection control, sharps safety and protective equipment. You are trained in Encompass, Northern Ireland's electronic health record system, and sign a confidentiality agreement covering its use. Staff check where your experience has gaps and work with clinic administrators to allocate suitable patients.

Students told GDC inspectors in March 2025 that they were generally confident across key treatments and happy with their amount of clinical experience. The panel suggested the school review its minimum numbers for some treatment types, which it considered low.

Each module publishes its own split between exams, coursework and practical work. Formats include written exams, multiple-choice questions (MCQs), case studies, group projects, Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) and clinical procedures on patients. An OSCE is a circuit of short, timed stations, each testing one skill against a set marking scheme. In the published breakdowns most modules are weighted entirely or mainly to exams, and coursework counts in only a handful.

Alongside exams you must complete compulsory elements, the practical and clinical tasks required to progress. Your clinical work is recorded on Liftupp, a digital assessment and feedback system used at every clinical site, including outreach clinics. It logs the procedures you carry out and how staff rate your clinical skills, communication and professionalism. Staff use it to give you feedback as you go and to support decisions about your progress.

Two groups, the Clinical Progress Monitoring Committee and the Compulsory Elements Committee, meet regularly to review each student's clinical targets and professionalism. They judge when each student is ready to move on to the next stage or to graduate. If you fall behind, extra teaching or catch-up work is timetabled.

Finals run in three blocks. Final BDS Part 1 is in year 4 and covers conservation, prosthetics and periodontics. Final BDS Part 2 comes in the autumn of year 5 and covers orthodontics, oral surgery and oral medicine, and paediatric and special care dentistry. Final BDS Part 3 is the year-long Practice of Dentistry module. You graduate only once every assessment and compulsory element is passed.

Summative assessments, the ones that count, use standard-setting methods such as the modified Angoff method and borderline regression, in which examiners' judgements of a borderline student help fix the pass mark. External examiners review exam papers in advance and attend exam boards.

At its March 2025 inspection the GDC found every requirement it reviewed met except one, which was partly met. The panel was not assured that data on how exam questions performed was used consistently, and it found similar multiple-choice questions reused across cohorts. The school accepted this and began reviewing how it tracks and retires questions. The GDC is following up through its 2026/27 annual monitoring.

Your clinical base throughout the course is the School of Dentistry on the Royal Victoria Hospital site in Belfast. There, Belfast Trust runs specialist clinics in oral surgery, oral medicine, orthodontics, restorative dentistry, prosthetics, periodontics and conservation for patients referred by dentists, family doctors (GPs) and hospital consultants. It also runs the student teaching clinics, among them the Urgent Student Clinic. The Trust's paediatric dental clinic is separate, in the Children's Hospital on the main Royal Victoria Hospital site.

Most outreach teaching comes in years 4 and 5. The year 4 orthodontics module includes an outreach placement, and in final year the Practice of Dentistry module has separate adult and paediatric outreach clinics. The three paediatric and special care dentistry modules, in years 3, 4 and 5, each also list clinical sessions in outreach clinics among their teaching.

The GDC's 2025 report says outreach clinics are supported by staff who also teach in the main school. Module co-ordinators oversee teaching and assessment there, and your clinical work is logged on Liftupp as it is in the hospital. The school collects feedback from students and patients on outreach placements. You pay your own travel costs to outreach clinics.

Intercalation means taking an extra year out of the dental course to earn an additional degree, usually in research, before rejoining the course. At Queen's it is optional. The dentistry course page says some students take a BSc year between years 2 and 3, while others join a taught Master's course after finishing year 3.

The course page names the Master's options within the school: the Master of Public Health (MPH), the MPH in Global Health and the MSc (Res) in Cancer Medicine. There are also MSc courses in Experimental Medicine, Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics, and Clinical Anatomy. The School of Psychology adds an MSc in Applied Developmental Psychology and an MSc in Clinical Health Psychology.

The school also has a general intercalation page for both medical and dental students. It says the extra year can come after year 2, 3 or 4 and can lead to a BSc, a Master's or a PhD. Intercalated study is mainly research-based. The page names four centres at the heart of the school's research. They are the Patrick G Johnston Centre for Cancer Research, the Wellcome-Wolfson Institute for Experimental Medicine, the Centre for Public Health and the Centre for Medical Education.

If you want research experience without adding a year, the school runs summer studentships. These are full-time projects, usually lasting 6 to 8 weeks between June and September, in one of the school's research or education centres, including the Centre for Dentistry. You work in a team of academic staff and research students, and dentistry students can apply.

The School of Dentistry at the Royal Victoria Hospital holds the Centre for Dentistry and the dental hospital, with recently refurbished clinics, a clinical skills laboratory and 90 dental chairs. Next door, the Mulhouse building has the medical and dental library and teaching rooms.

You use the Clinical Techniques Laboratory throughout the course, with extra sessions on haptic dental simulators. A refurbished prosthetics teaching laboratory, where denture work is taught, opened in 2023. Queen's says it has recently brought digital dentistry techniques into the course.

The Centre for Dentistry says you will take part in high-fidelity simulation, meaning realistic practice scenarios, in the KN Cheung SK Chin InterSim Centre. The centre has run since 2021 and is used for simulation teaching in dentistry, nursing, midwifery, medicine and pharmacy.

The Medical Biology Centre, on the Health Sciences campus on Lisburn Road, has three large lecture theatres and the Biomedical Library. It also holds two refurbished gross anatomy laboratories, a Virtual Histology Microscopy suite for studying tissue slides on screen, and two physiology teaching laboratories. The Whitla Medical Building next door houses the school's main office.

GDC inspectors in March 2025 found the clinics generally well equipped and maintained. The school told them Belfast Trust has 15 dental chairs to replace across its dental clinics within five years, as part of a wider renovation plan. Concerns about Wi-Fi and drinking water in the school's clinics had been raised, and bottled water was being provided while the plumbing was sorted out with the Trust.

Every dental student has a personal tutor, and the student wellbeing team offers pastoral, academic and study skills advice. Academic staff and senior clinicians in the Centre for Dentistry also provide pastoral support. The GDC's 2025 report describes a Wellbeing Lead and regular support meetings that track each student's wellbeing, behaviour and academic progress.

Reasonable adjustments, such as extended deadlines, changes to clinical arrangements and rest breaks, are set out in Individual Student Agreements. GDC inspectors saw examples of these working well while keeping patient safety first.

Students can raise problems through the Student Voice Committee, module evaluations and course groups that cover the foundation years, the dental specialties and restorative dentistry. The QUB BDSA, the dental students' society, runs social and sporting events through the year.

Because you are training for a regulated profession, you sign a Student Agreement every year that commits you to professional behaviour and to declaring any convictions or cautions. The school acts on low-level concerns, and serious ones go to its Student Professionalism Committee.