CATEGORY AUSTRALASIAN DENTIST 101 Dr Shahana Abed is a reconstructive and aesthetic dentist, implant clinician, educator, and healthcare strategist with a passion for improving access to highquality dental care in regional Australia. She combines clinical practice with mentoring, education, and systems development. BEYOND CLINICAL The future isn’t more flights. It’s smarter systems. FIFO clinicians are part of the solution. They are not the whole solution. The future of regional healthcare lies in building systems that make geography matter less. That means embracing digital treatment planning and virtual multidisciplinary case discussions. It means mentoring regional clinicians so that more advanced procedures can be performed locally. It means creating consistent clinical protocols that allow patients to receive the same quality of care whether they are treated in Sydney or Griffith. It means using technology to extend expertise rather than concentrating it in major cities. It means flying knowledge – not just clinicians. Every regional practitioner who becomes more confident, every local team that develops new skills, every patient who no longer needs to travel hundreds of kilometres for treatment represents a sustainable improvement in healthcare access. That should be our goal. Every postcode deserves the same standard of care. Healthcare should never be determined by someone’s postcode. Whether a patient lives in a capital city, a regional centre or a remote farming community, they deserve the same compassion, the same quality of clinical decision-making and the same opportunity to access modern healthcare. Regional dentistry is not about doing dentistry somewhere else. It is about ensuring that geography becomes increasingly irrelevant to the quality of care people receive. That requires clinicians. It requires educators. It requires mentors. It requires technology. Most importantly, it requires systems. Looking beyond the runway Every time I board a flight to a regional clinic, I’m reminded that the aircraft itself isn’t the story. The story is the patient waiting on the other end. The young clinician seeking mentorship. The local team wanting to offer more. The community determined to build stronger healthcare closer to home. Regional dentistry has never been about flying further. It has always been about bringing healthcare closer. If we truly want to improve healthcare access across Australia, we need to stop asking how we move patients to care. We should be asking how we move expertise, knowledge and opportunity to patients instead. Because the future of regional healthcare will not be defined by how many kilometres clinicians travel. It will be defined by how effectively we build systems that ensure every Australian – regardless of where they live has access to exceptional care. u
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