Seventeen years after its regulation, more than a hundred dentists will be able to define in April the first board of the College of Oral Surgery. António José de Sousa heads the first list to present itself in an unprecedented election to this body of the Portuguese Dental Association (OMD). If the present is a time for “hands on” work, the dentist sees the future of the specialty with a greater participation of colleagues, looking at the training of professionals, communication, and social action as flagships of the project he presents for the next four years.
What is the importance of the specialty colleges of the Order of Dentists (OMD), in the institution and in the profession, namely the one for Oral Surgery to which you are running?
I see the College playing a key role in the dental organics. It is the College that defines all the legal criteria, acting as a bridge between dentists, educational institutions, scientific societies, training centres and society. The College is responsible, for example, for the transcription and adaptation of international guidelines to Portugal, which are fundamental to support the legis artis, in defence of the patient and the oral surgeon. The College is also important because it defines norms and attributes suitability criteria to the institutions that propose to provide specialisation teaching, suited to the current demands of oral surgery training in Portugal, so that they are fulfilled by the institutions where the training takes place.
After the Oral Surgery specialty was created by the OMD in 1999, it was only officially instituted in 2012. For you, what has been lost in this long process of recognition of the specialty?
In reality, 22 of the Official Gazette, published on 19th of June 2003, stated that “the dates and deadlines for Oral Surgery will be defined in the rules of procedure of the respective College”. Now, this never happened. Although the College was formally established with four colleagues on the board, it was not until September 2015 that the law governing the College of Oral Surgery was passed and with that the special call for applications was opened, which concluded on 8 April 2017, with 139 colleagues being awarded the title. We know that the creation of the new specialties resulted from the demands of the Troika, without which we would possibly still have no specialists. Dentistry and the population have lost 17 years due to the absolute lack of will on the part of those who ran the Order and the College. It is time to get to work and leave the past behind without forgetting it, to try not to repeat the same mistakes.
Full interview in DentalPro 158.
