Dental tourism could be a subset of the arena known as medical tourism. It involves individuals seeking dental care outside of their local healthcare systems.
While dental tourists might travel for a variety of reasons, their decisions are typically driven by value considerations. Wide variations in the economics of countries with shared borders are the historical mainstay of the sector. Examples include travel from Austria to Slovakia and Slovenia, the US to Mexico, and therefore the Republic of Ireland to Northern Ireland. Whereas medical tourism is typically generalized to travel from high-income countries to low-price developing economies, alternative factors will influence a decision to travel, as well as differences between the funding of public healthcare or general access to healthcare.

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 see whether or not consumers were receiving price for money from their dentists. Each countries’ professions were criticized for an absence of pricing transparency. A response to this is that dentistry is unsuitable for clear pricing: each treatment will vary, an accurate quote is impossible until an examination has occurred. Thus value lists are not any guarantee of ultimate costs. Though they’ll encourage a level of competition between dentists, this can solely happen in an exceedingly competitive atmosphere where supply and demand are closely matched. The 2007 Competition Authority report in the Irish Republic criticized the profession on its approach to increasing numbers of dentists and therefore the coaching of dental specialties – orthodontics was a explicit space for concern with coaching being irregular and limited in number of places. Provide is further restricted as new dental specialties develop and dentists react to client demand for brand spanking new dental merchandise, further diluting the pool of dentists accessible for any given procedure.

For countries inside the European Union, dental qualifications are required to succeed in a minimum approved by every country’s government. Therefore a dentist qualified in one country will apply to any different EU country to follow in that country, allowing for larger mobility of labor for dentists (Directives usually apply not only to the EU however to the broader 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 plus programs to facilitate dental students completing half of their education in foreign dentistry colleges Standardization of qualification in a region reciprocally removes one among the perceptual barriers for the event of patient mobility within that region.