Health Ministry to introduce digital dentistry this year

The dentistry department in the public health sector can look forward to improved services this year with the introduction of digital dentistry services, which were provisioned for in the Health Ministry 2025 Budget.
Health Minister, Dr Frank Anthony shared about this development during the budget estimates last week Wednesday. Once operationalised this new initiative will see citizens being able to procure dental crowns within hours.
“We are moving towards digital dentistry, where when somebody comes in if they need a crown it would be able to be designed on the screen and once that is designed, they send it to a mill and it’s milled right in the facility and within an hour they will be able to put in that crown for you. So we have bought the equipment and this year we should get that up and running,” Dr Anthony informed.
According to Anthony the digital dentistry service will build on the existing improvements and expansion that have been made towards dental services available in the public health care system. This year’s MOH budget is catering for an increased output of almost 6000 additional preventative and curative procedures most of which will cater for dental procedures.
“What we have been able to do here over the last couple of years is to increase the amount of dental chairs that we have. Every region now has the capacity to do dental care and we have improved the facilities that we now have at the Cheddi Jagan dental centre. We have been able to do a lot more procedures and we are now doing services like root canals at some of the facilities. We also recently added CT scans and X rays at quite a number of our facilities,” he noted.
In the 2025 Budget, the health sector was allocated $143.2 billion to, among other priorities, build capacity, improve services, and expand health infrastructure.
During the consideration of the Ministry’s budget estimates in the National Assembly, Anthony had highlighted the Government’s commitment to building a world-class healthcare system.