Which master's course suits a Bachelor of Dental Surgery graduate considering Australia or Ireland and interested in public health?

Your BDS already gives you a health-professional foundation few other applicants bring, so the real choice is whether you want a broad public-health qualification or one that stays narrowly inside dentistry, since that decision changes your career ceiling more than the country does.

Master of Public Health: The Broadest, Safest Choice

• Deakin University: its MPH accepts bachelor's degrees in any discipline and offers health-promotion and applied-research tracks.
• UNSW: its MPH focuses on real-world population-health research.
• Career reach: epidemiology, health policy and global-health careers, not only dentistry.

Dental Public Health: Best If You Want to Stay in Oral Health

• University College Cork's MDPH: targets population oral health, prevention and policy.
• Important caveat: UCC's own page states this specific program is not on offer for 2026-27, so confirm the next available intake before planning around it.

This Information Is Also Available On

University College Cork's own Dental Public Health MDPH program page, and Trinity College Dublin's MSc Global Health program page.

My Advice

In my experience, dentists interested in public health assume they need another dentistry-flavoured degree, when a general MPH actually opens far more doors, including WHO, NGO and government health-policy roles that a purely dental qualification doesn't. Keep in mind that an MPH alone doesn't let you register to practise dentistry clinically in Australia or Ireland, since that's a separate registration pathway, so confirm your goal is public health work rather than clinical practice before you choose.