Dental tourism

Dental Tourism is a subset of the sector known as medical tourism. It involves individuals seeking dental care outside of their local healthcare systems.

Reasons for travel
While dental tourists may travel for a variety of reasons, their choices are usually driven by driven by price considerations. Wide variations in the economics of countries with shared borders have been the historical mainstay of the sector. Examples include travel from Austria to Hungary and Slovenia, the U.S.A to Mexico, and the Republic of Ireland to Northern Ireland. While medical tourism is often generalized to travel from high income countries to low cost developing economies, other factors can influence a decision to travel, including differences between the funding of public healthcare or general access to healthcare.

Mobility of Labour
For countries within the European Union, dental qualifications are required to reach a minimum approved by each country’s government. Thus a dentist qualified in one country can apply to any other EU country to practice in that country as a dentist allowing for greater mobility of labour for dentists (Directives typically apply not only to the EU but to the wider designation of the European Economic Area - EEA). The Association for Dental Education in Europe (ADEE) has standardization efforts to harmonize European Standards. Proposals from the ADEE's Quality Assurance and Benchmarking taskforce cover the introduction of accreditation procedures for EU dentistry universities as well as programmes to facilitate dental students completing part of their education in foreign dentistry schools. Standardization of qualification in a region reciprocally removes one of the perceptual barriers for the development of patient mobility within that region.

Pricing and quality
The UK and The Republic of Ireland are two of the largest sources of Dental Tourists. Both have had their dental professions examined by competition authorities to determine whether consumers were receiving value for money from their dentists. Both countries’ professions were criticised for a lack of pricing transparency. A response to this is that dentistry is unsuitable for transparent pricing: each treatment will vary, an accurate quote is impossible until an examination has occurred. Thus price lists are no guarantee of final costs. Though they may encourage a level of competition between dentists, this will only happen in a competitive environment where supply and demand are closely matched. The 2007 Competition Authority report in the Irish Republic criticised the profession on its approach to increasing numbers of dentists and the training of dental specialties – orthodontics was a particular area for concern with training being irregular and limited in number of places. Supply is further limited as new dental specialties develop and dentists react to consumer demand for new dental products, further diluting the pool of dentists available for any given procedure.

Media Coverage
The sector has received media coverage in the U.S.A, the UK and Ireland. The majority of articles originate in money or finance sections of press publications highlighting the savings available from travel. Articles often carry warnings from the local dental professional body advising against travel or recommending that patients should be aware that redress may be different or unavailable in foreign countries and that the constraints placed upon procedures if they are to be carried out during a short stay may lead to poorer quality work than if the same procedure was carried out over a longer period at home .Though informative of the potential for difficulties and the personal experience of individual patients there tends to be little comparative data to draw conclusions from.