Dr. Rory Boyd:

Dental tourism has got a lot of media coverage over the last 12 months plus. Dr. Cleary and I work in an area of dentistry that ends up dealing with a lot of the cases that return home so we both have very personal experience of cases where treatment is not appropriate or is not up to scratch. We need to be very careful when talking about treatment abroad and delineate between those who went abroad with a treatment need and those who went abroad for elective or cosmetic treatment, as suggested by the Deputy.

The number of people I see in practice who went abroad with a treatment need, such as pain, an infection or oral disease, is very few. The number of patients that I see who went abroad for elective treatment, such as cosmetic veneers or crowns to improve or change the appearance of their teeth, is very high and generally in the younger demographic. We need to delineate between those who are being forced to go abroad with a treatment need, which is because they cannot avail of treatment here, and those who travel purely for cost reasons for larger cosmetic reconstructions. In general, the latter are the ones with bigger problems that I see.

The Deputy is correct that there has been a massive increase in the number of people who travel abroad for treatment, regardless of their reasons. We must be quite clear that just because people travel abroad for treatment does not mean their treatment will be sub par. A lot of jurisdictions across the world have fabulous treatment. The problem is that we are seeing an increase in the number of people coming back with sub-par treatment.