The ADC works to protect the health and safety of the public by ensuring dental practitioners meet the high standards required of dental professionals in Australia.
Information for internationally qualified dental practitioners on assessment pathways and requirements for practice in Australia.
Guidance and resources for education providers delivering ADC-accredited dental practitioner programs in Australia.
Learn more about our submissions, consultations and research activities that support the oral health sector
ADC International (ADCI) is a leading independent authority in accreditation and assessment of health programs worldwide, with a particular focus on oral health.
Professional accreditation provides an assessment of the quality of training delivered by education providers and a mechanism for accountability against professional standards. It ensures that education providers produce graduates who are sufficiently competent to join the workforce and, within the healthcare sector, ensures graduates can perform their roles safely and effectively. Although approaches differ, the ultimate goal is to ensure the public receive safe and high-quality care from practitioners who graduate from accredited programs. However, despite the widespread implementation of professional accreditation, there is a limited evidence base regarding its impacts and how to enhance these.
To better understand the impact of accreditation, the ADC commissioned RAND Australia to undertake a research project titled Understanding and evaluating the impact of dental program accreditation.
The research aimed to develop a framework that will help the ADC to identify and measure whether its accreditation activities are effective in producing competent and safe dental practitioners and to assess the overall impact of accreditation on the oral health of the Australian population.
The framework articulates the ways in which ADC accreditation activities support their intended outcomes and impacts. It highlights the dual nature of ADC’s activities:
It brings together a logic model, mechanisms of impact, indicators and strategies for measuring impact.
To further test and refine this framework, in 2024–25 the ADC commissioned RAND Australia to undertake broader stakeholder consultation to highlight the importance of program accreditation within health and professional accreditation more broadly. This research (Phase 2) explored stakeholders’ perspectives about the ADC’s accreditation activities and proposed logic model for generating impact in greater detail.
The applicability of the ADC’s impact mechanisms, specified in the Phase 1 research, was examined. Recommendations were also provided for how these impact mechanisms can be leveraged to assist the ADC to improve its impact against its strategic and accreditation objectives aligned to public health outcomes.
Findings were published in the 2025 report, Increasing the impact of dental program accreditation processes: Identifying strengths and opportunities for improvement.
The report outlined several actionable recommendations to enhance the ADC’s impact. These include ways to better leverage existing mechanisms to strengthen alignment with both strategic and accreditation objectives, aligned to public health outcomes.