Hungarian dentists seeking patients in Britain

Getting your jaw X-rayed by a foreign practitioner in a blowup tent may sound like a hard sell to British patients, but a group of Hungarian dentists is arguing otherwise.

Their blowup dental clinic is touring the U.K. to showcase their hygiene, professionalism and affordability to the British.

It's all in the hope of attracting a bigger share of Britain's "dental tourists"— patients looking to Eastern Europe for cut-price crowns, bargain bridges and inexpensive tooth implants.

"It's to reassure people," said Christopher Hall, the managing director of Hungarian Dental Travel Ltd., a group that organizes trips for patients seeking dental treatment in Hungary. His company is organizing the inflatable clinic's tour.

"People are quite cautious about wanting to travel to Hungary," he said. "It's a former communist country, and a lot of the people who want to use our services are over 40 or 50," old enough to remember when Hungary was still behind the Iron Curtain.

Basic dental care in Britain is free to those under 16 or over 60, the unemployed, students, military veterans and some low-income families. For others, government dentists offer lower prices than private practitioners.

However, the government does not cover cosmetic dentistry, and a recent reorganization of the way dentists work has prompted many to leave the public sector. Katherine Murphy, a spokeswoman for The Patients Association, an advocacy group, said it was proving increasingly difficult for Britons to get anything beyond basic dental care from Britain's National Health Service.

With Poland, Hungary and other Eastern European countries only a low-cost flight away, she said many Britons were tempted to try their luck abroad.

TreatmentAbroad, a Web site devoted to promoting medical tourism, said that 22,000 Britons went overseas for dental treatment in 2007 and that it expected the figure to rise.

Hall said that while a tooth implant could cost more than 2,000 pounds (US$3,500) in Britain, a Hungarian dentist could perform the same procedure for 700 pounds (US$1,250).

Hall's 13-foot by 13-foot PVC tent, which inflates in four minutes, is being ferried across the country in a former ambulance. Five dentists are flying in from Hungary to meet the tent along its route and staff outdoor clinics where they can offer consultations and estimates to potential patients for 15 pounds (US$27) a visit.

There won't be any dental work going on inside, Hall said, although dentists — who are registered with Britain's regulatory authority — will be offering checkups, complete with X-rays courtesy of a gun-like device specially adapted for use in the tent.

The British Dental Association said that while medical tourism may sound tempting, it had reports of cases where British dentists had to take remedial action to fix damaged caused by shoddy foreign dentistry.