Spain, along with Greece, is the European country with the highest proportion of direct expenditure on oral care and the country with the least public funding.according to the atlas ‘Oral Health in the European Union’, presented by General Council of Dentists and where the oral health situation in Europe is reflected.

“This work has enabled us Know the state of oral health in all European countries and make comparisons with Spain compared to others”, commented the president of the General Council of Dentists, Oscar Castro.

In particular, the work shows that in Europe more than half of the total spending dental care come from direct patient paymentsso the kind of treatment that is European “they stop more often” for financial reasons.

In this sense, Spain occupies ranks lowest in terms of public participation in dental extractionwith a coverage of only two percent, while in other countries, such as Germany, it reaches 68 percent.

type of dental treatment

There are three types of dental treatment in the European Union: limited coveragethat’s happening in countries like Spain, Greece, Italy, and Portugal and where practically excluded from public coverage; that part (France, Belgium, England or Sweden) where the public treasury assumes either 25 and 40 percent; and integral (Germany, Austria and Luxembourg), in which participation was between 70 and 75 percent.

On the other hand, the atlas shows that a third of European youth 12 years of suffering cavity in permanent teeth, although caries has decreased in the last four decades in most European countries, although dentists still consider it a public health problem that must be “addressed”.

in spain, The index of decayed, missing and filled teeth (CAOD) is 0.6, only lower in Germany and Denmark. About periodontal pocketprevalence in adults is within the European country average, equal to oral cancer incidencewhere more than 65,000 new cases were detected across Europe in 2020.

How many dentists are there in Spain?

In relationship by the number of dentiststhe European average is 76 per 100,000 population, while in Spain it is at 85 professionals for every 100,000 citizens (1 dentist for every 1,100 inhabitants), ranked, along with Romania and Bulgaria, at one of the rates “higher” Europe.

“In Spain there is no shortage of dentists, but rather a surplus, and the only option they have is to go abroad“Castro stressed, to report, regarding number of annual visits to the dentistwhere the atlas collects an average of 1.15, although in the case of Spain it lies at 0.7 visits, behind Europe along with Hungary, Romania and Cyprus.

Around 30,000 dentists currently practice as specialists across Europe, although Spain is “the only European country” that does not have a recognized specialty in dentistry and, as Castro criticized, there are “serious bureaucratic problems for the Administration to understand that dentists they have to be specialized to present in the best possible way to the patient”.