How much does dentistry abroad cost? There is a lot more to dental treatment abroad, than just the cost involved, and by putting an emphasis on the prices of the actual dental treatments done, many UK dentists feel that we are encouraging our UK patients to choose the least expensive and not the best quality treatment.
The fear among UK dental professionals is that open price competition will lead to a race to the bottom, where quality no longer matters. But this fear is blinding the same professionals to the reason that we are obsessed with price at Smile Clinic – Dental Holiday:
This information is what our UK dental patients want.
Consider the following:
- 55% of all enquiries sent to our dental clinic abroad specifically mention the price, cost or fee being charged.
- 84% of our visitors from the UK admit to having delayed dental work because of the costs involved. This is a shameful statistic.
- Nearly 100% of our UK dental patients who travel abroad for dental treatment cite price as their primary motivation, and are aware of the prices charge by their local dentist.
After 9 years of running Smile Clinic – Dental Holiday and treating over 3,000 UK dental patient we know that price is the number one piece of information potential UK dental patients are interested in. They want price transparency and we work continually to give it.
Tell it like it is
We understand that a price alone can’t tell the whole story. There are different material options available, dentists can have different qualifications and experience, and facilities can be state of the art, or decades old. This information is difficult to communicate to our patients, but the answer isn’t to create an information vacuum.
We try to share as much information as possible on our website before our patients even begin to fill in our online form or telephone us, so that we are as transparent as possible.
And it’s not just the dental prices we are interested in publishing. We want to share as much relevant dental information with the UK public as possible. What brand of dental implant do we use? How many times have we done the “all on 4” dental implant procedure? What specialist training does Dr Marek have? How long have we been treating UK dental patients?
The fact remains though, “How much do you charge for… ?” is one of the most common enquiries that clinics receive from patients, and if you’re going to tell patients how much you charge, why not tell them why you charge that much by providing a little extra information? Prices don’t tell the whole story, but they are a starting point.
Obviously not all dental treatments have a fixed price, such as bone grafts or sinus lifts, but they all have a fixed lowest price. Price ranges give patients a clear idea of what to expect even if they’re not exact. By not publishing any prices at all though patients often feel that the price they are quoted has more to do with their ability to pay than the treatment they will receive, and ultimately encourages them to “shop around”.
Speak plain English please!
Another issue that gets raised time and time again by UK dentists is the wording used when talking about pricing dentistry. “Patients aren’t consumers”, “we have fees, not prices”, and “dentistry isn’t a commodity, you can’t compare prices” are common complaints.
The problem here though is that patients, or consumers, or visitors, or whichever word you want to use to describe them don’t care which wording is correct. They talk about prices and they talk about cost. They nearly never talk about fees.
Moreover, how they talk is how they search for us on the internet, so to get the right information to them today that’s how we talk too. If and when tour UK dental patients start talking about fees instead of prices or costs, then we will too.
The price is right
We share all our dental price information because our patients want to know beforehand exactly how much they can save by having their dentistry done all abroad. We want to share quality dental information, because our patients should know that we’re the best at what we do, and that they are in the right hands.