Dear Mary,
thank you for kind invitation. Let me tell you and our friends about dental tourism written in The Observer.
Last year 20,000 Britons went abroad for dental treatment. Lisa Bachelor finds out the drill
Sunday September 23, 2007
The Observer
Growing numbers of Britons are now jetting off to the likes of Hungary to cut the cost of their dental bills.
Fifty thousand people in the UK travelled abroad for medical treatment last year and 20,000 of these did so for the sake of their teeth. The average spend on dentistry was L2,500, 300 clinics, medical tourism companies, hospitals, doctors, dentists and healthcare providers overseas that are promoting their services to the UK market.
Cost is the biggest factor driving people overseas - savings of more than 80 per cent can be made on some forms of treatment - but the rise in dental tourists has also been due to changes in the NHS in the past year. The biggest growth in dental tourism appears to have been fuelled by the changes to NHS dental contracts, especially for people who want more complex procedures carried out. They are either struggling to find a dentist to do it or when they do are being met with costs of L10,000 to L15,000 in some cases.'
Those who go overseas for dental treatment can be broadly divided into two categories: people who need a lot of expensive, unavoidable work done and those who want cosmetic procedures. 'If you need something minor done the cost of the travel and accommodation is likely to outweigh the savings, but if you are going for crowns, veneers or implants then you could save thousands of pounds.
Lee Mitchell, 33, runs a bar and restaurant on Guernsey and has just come back, where he spent an entire week at the dentist. 'I had seven fillings, two extractions, a root canal, some reconstruction work, a crown and some bleaching,' he says. 'I had never thought of going abroad for treatment but when I realised how much work I needed doing a couple of my waitresses suggested.'
Within days he had booked his flight. A representative from the clinic sorted him out with accommodation and picked him up at the airport.All the clinics are used to having international patients. Hungary has some of the leading technology and strictest dental regulations in the world. Whole towns on the Hungarian-Austrian border have an economy almost entirely based on dentistry.'