Dental tourism: UK dentists report costly complications

More than half a million Britons travelled abroad for treatment in 2024, but who is treating the complications back home? Bill Schaeffer shares The Implant Centre’s analysis of the latest figures on dental tourism.

New analysis of official data by The Implant Centre shows outbound medical travel from the UK has risen 50% in two years. A British Dental Association (BDA) survey found 94% of dentists had examined a patient treated overseas, and one in five had seen a case costing more than £5,000 to put right. 

The survey of 1,000 UK dentists found cost was the motivation for 98% of patients, and shorter waiting times for 31%.

In February 2025, a British Dental Journal (BDJ) article reviewed 131 UK newspaper articles from 2018 to 2023, identifying social media as a central driver, with TikTok and Instagram transformations popularising the trend known as ‘Turkey teeth’. 

Bill Schaeffer, implant surgeon at The Implant Centre said: ‘The patients I see are not naive. They are people who could not get an appointment, or could not afford one in the UK, and made a rational decision with the information they had.

‘What they were not told is that if it goes wrong there is no regulator to call, and that the person fixing it may not be able to identify what was put in their mouth. That second operation is almost always harder than the first one would have been.’

The complications that come home

The BDA’s survey found 94% had examined a patient who had been treated abroad, and 86% of those had gone on to treat complications from that work. Crowns were the most common problem at 87%, followed by implants at 85%. The problems dentists reported were failing or failed treatment (86%), pain (76%) and poorly executed work (72%). 

The repairs are not cheap. Remedial costs above £500 were reported by 56% of dentists, with 51% above £1,000 and 20% above £5,000. Around 40% said the NHS had picked up the bill for that remedial work, meaning treatment bought privately overseas is being repaired at public expense.

No regulator, no recourse 

The General Dental Council’s reach stops at the UK border. Its own guidance to patients states plainly that it ‘can’t guarantee another organisation like us exists in other countries, or even that the standards will be the same as they are here’. A patient treated overseas who wants to complain has no UK regulator to complain to. 

Redress abroad is uncertain. The BDJ has reported that in India, 95% of dental malpractice cases are unsuccessful. In the BDA survey, 77% of dentists named difficulty with complaints and redress as a concern, and 93% named continuity of care. 

The clinical problems can outlast the legal ones. Writing in the BDJ, Ashiti and Moshkun describe UK dentists facing ‘a challenging predicament, not only clinically but also ethically and medico-legally’, including implants placed using systems that cannot be identified, which means the implant cannot be safely restored and may have to be removed and replaced entirely. 

What can UK practices do?

Bill Schaeffer highlighted that The Implant Centre audits the outcome of every implant it places and publishes the result. In its most recent audit period, 98.7% of the implants it placed were a success. Every implant is included in the figure, with no exclusions for complex cases or for implants placed to replace work that had failed elsewhere. The practice publishes its full methodology and its definitions online. 

He said: ‘We publish our own failure rate because anyone placing implants should be able to provide that information. You record the total number of implants that have failed within a set period and divide that by the total number of implants placed during that same period, then multiply by 100 to get the failure rate. If a clinic cannot tell you how often its implants fail, whether it is in Sussex or Istanbul, that silence is the answer.’

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