Dental graduates’ perspective of professionalism competences from a developing country

Objective: to evaluate the perception of fresh dental graduates regarding professional competences essential for a graduating dentist. methods: this quantitative,descriptive,cross-sectional study was conducted at four public and four private sector dental colleges in punjab,pakistan,from june to december 2014,and comprised dental graduates of the years 2013 and 2014. a comprehensive document containing 32 professionalism competences,divided into 3 sub-domains,was developed based on the competence documents of local and foreign accrediting bodies. responses were recorded on a five-point likert scale. the competences were categorised as 'essential' and 'good to have' based on the agreement cut-off of 75%. spss 21 was used for data analysis. results: of the 386 participants,152(39.4%) were from public-sector colleges and 234(60.6%) from private ones. the overall mean age was 23.69±1.06 years. of the 32 competences,the participants marked 18(56.25%) as 'essential' and 15(46.9%) as 'good to have'. in the latter category,3(20%) competences were from the domain of professional attitude and behaviour,7(46.6%) from ethics and jurisprudence and 4(26.7%) from the domain of communication and interpersonal skills. conclusion: pakistani dental graduates had an overall positive attitude regarding professionalism competences. © 2017,pakistan medical association. all rights reserved.