To overcome practices and concepts which are incoherent with the new proposals built for the health area in the last decades is a challenge to be faced by health services providing care for workers in Brazil. The present study discuss the professional work of dentists, contextualizing and acknowledging the regulation of the new specialization called 'Occupational Dentistry' from a review of the history of health public policies and the development of concepts of workers' health care. The discussion over its regulation is marked by historical contradiction between a liberal rationality and the construction of a new care model. An intervention that takes into account the historical achievements guaranteed by law of the specificities of the third industrial revolution (change in the productive chain) in the workers' epidemiological profile, must be part of the construction of this specialization and of this type of care.
Occupational Health; Occupational Dentistry; Human Resources Formation