PROFESSIONAL RECOGNITION AND LICENSING IN DENTISTRY IN THE AGE OF ISO CERTIFICATION SYSTEMS: A GLOBAL REVIEW

Dentistry is regulated worldwide through statutory licensing systems that grant individual practitioners the legal right to practise, and, increasingly, through voluntary certification frameworks built on documents issued by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) that attest to the quality of dental materials, instruments, management systems and, in principle, individual competence. Confusion between these two forms of professional recognition is common among practitioners, regulators, patients and policymakers, with implications for patient safety, workforce mobility and professional identity. This review examines the relationship between statutory professional licensing and ISO-based certification systems in dentistry globally. A narrative review of the published literature, regulatory documents, and technical committee records was undertaken, covering dental material and device standards developed by ISO Technical Committee 106 (ISO/TC 106), management-system certification under ISO 9001, personnel certification under ISO/IEC 17024, and information-security standards relevant to digital dentistry, alongside statutory licensing arrangements in the European Union, the United Kingdom, North America, Australasia, the Gulf Cooperation Council and sub-Saharan Africa. The review finds that ISO standards in dentistry principally govern products, laboratory test methods and organisational quality-management systems rather than individual clinical licensure, and that ISO/IEC 17024, although capable of underpinning personnel certification, remains largely unused by statutory dental regulators. Licensure continues to rest on national legislation, professional boards and accreditation of dental education, with mutual recognition agreements offering only partial and regionally fragmented pathways for workforce mobility. ISO certification and statutory licensing are best understood as complementary rather than interchangeable mechanisms: ISO systems can strengthen quality assurance, patient safety and the international credibility of dental practices, but they cannot substitute for the legal function that licensure performs in protecting the public. Greater conceptual clarity around these distinct but overlapping mechanisms is needed to guide health policy, professional associations and individual practitioners.