Reimagining oral health professionalism in Africa: a narrative from the margins

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Background: The Western Enlightenment model of oral health professionalism in Africa, emphasizing clinical detachment and biomedical reductionism, fails to resonate with communities like the Yorùbá, where oral health is intertwined with spiritual personhood and relational knowing. This paper critiques colonial epistemological foundations underpinning oral health professionalism, articulates an Ubuntu-informed alternative grounded in Yorùbá knowledge, and proposes a relational framework centering marginalized community. Methods: We conducted a critical interpretive synthesis to integrate insights from community-based participatory research in Yorùbá communities, feminist epistemology, African philosophy, and health professions education through iterative dialogue between empirical findings and theoretical frameworks. We examined colonial epistemologies and articulated a relational alternative for oral health professionalism. Results: Oral health professionalism in Africa remains shaped by colonial epistemologies that privilege clinical detachment while excluding indigenous knowledge systems. An Ubuntu-informed alternative, attentive to feminist critiques of gendered power relations, offers a foundation through mutual vulnerability, clinical empathy, and ecological professional identity formation across interdependent domains. Transformations across curriculum, assessment, workforce policy, research, and governance are required to address epistemic injustices. Conclusion: Reimagining oral health professionalism in Africa requires approaches holding clinical excellence and relational depth, recognizing professional identity as formed through interdependent relationships. Dental education must transform by reconceptualising itself as an ecology of relations cultivating practitioners accountable to communities as both knowers and learners.

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