On January 10, 2025, new legislation in Massachusetts was passed and signed into law allowing foreign trained dentists with at least five years of experience and certification from an approved jurisdiction to obtain a dental hygiene license.

“An Act Relative to Dental Hygienist Reciprocal Licensure,” sponsored by Representative Tackey Chan (Quincy) also allows full-time dental students who have completed at least four semesters of dental school to practice as dental hygienists in Massachusetts.   The law came as a resulting of efforts by Massachusetts dentist Dr. Abe Abdul and Representative Chan to respond to a need for more hygienists in the state as well as to tap into the best use of qualifications of dental providers coming from other countries with appropriate dental training programs as well as the dental students with comparable training at the end of four semesters of full dental licensure education at an accredited dental school.

Many foreign trained dentists in Massachusetts have limited licenses which allow them to serve as dental school instructors, but need to have graduated from an accredited dental school in the United States or another approved jurisdiction such as Canada to gain full licensure as dentists.

Dr. Abdul, who has gained a reputation for being a driving force behind significant dental legislation such as the dental loss ratio law requiring minimum patient care expenditures from dental insurers (which now continues to gain momentum with similar legislation in other states), acknowledged the participation of the Massachusetts Dental Hygienists Association, which wanted additional verbiage added to the bill to ensure patient safety.

The law also mandates that the jurisdiction where the dentist received his or her training and education requires a degree of competency determined by the Board of Registration in Dentistry to comparable to that required of hygienist examinees in Massachusetts. The pool of approximately 5000 foreign trained dentists who seek admission to the 200 annually available openings in dental schools in Massachusetts provides significant skilled potential hygienists who may qualify for the new category.

Interestingly the newly passed Massachusetts legislation has already attracted formal attention from other state legislatures, just as the dental loss ratio law did. In Virginia, to alleviate a shortage of dental providers there, a comparable bill allowing foreign trained dentists to practice as hygienists has been introduced by the only dentist in the Virgina legislature, Senator Todd Pillion (R-Washington County).  Virgina also has a law similar to the existing law in Massachusetts making foreign trained dentists eligible to serve as dental school instructors. That law had sunset provision expiring on July, 2025, and two new bills filed in December will extend that law.

Brian Hatch
Hatch Legal Group
8 North Main Street, Suite 403
Attleboro, MA 02703
HatchLegalGroup.com
brianhatch@hatchlawoffices.com
508-222-6400