Juliette Gagliardi
Junior Researcher
Oral health and dental care in Italy - Statistics & Facts
Italy’s healthcare system provides free universal coverage or, depending on the type of service and the patient’s characteristics, healthcare services are provided after a small co-payment. However, when it comes to dental care, dental and orthodontic services are rarely granted coverage. Indeed, of almost 50 thousand dentists in Italy, 95 percent work in private practice. Even though dental care services are cheaper in Italy than in other countries (for example, they are on average 30 percent less expensive than in the UK), for Italians the high cost of dental and orthodontic care is one of the main reasons for not going to the dentist. Especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, expenditure for dental care in Italy has decreased by roughly 14 percent since 2018, with about six out of ten Italians not going to the dentist.
Oral health
Lip and especially oral cancers are among the diseases that dentists can detect. In Italy, the number of new cases of lip and oral cavity cancer in 2020 was roughly four thousand, more than half of the diagnosed were males. Among the most common oral diseases, untreated caries on deciduous teeth in children aged between one and nine years had a prevalence of 36.1 percent in 2019. Untreated caries on permanent teeth of people aged over five years also had a high prevalence, with almost 30 percent. Although these figures paint quite a negative picture of Italian dental care, a recent consumer survey indicated that among all personal care products, oral and dental care products (such as toothpaste and mouthwash) are the most used by Italians.Medical and dental instruments industry
The import and export market for medical instruments and appliances, including the ones used for dental care, is growing in Italy, with export and import values increasing constantly in the last decade. Furthermore, the annual revenue of the medical and dental industry in Italy increased overall between 2010 and 2020, reaching a value of roughly 9.8 billion euros in 2020. Nevertheless, this figure decreased considerably between 2019 and 2020, with the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the number of enterprises manufacturing medical and dental instruments has decreased slightly across the country, the number of employees in the industry has grown, reaching 37.1 thousand employees in 2021.
