The share of young dentists has increased rapidly over the last ten years. According to National Health Information Centre (NCZI), in 2021, dentists under the age of 40 represented 40.4% of all dentists in Slovakia – this stood at just above a quarter of all dentists (25.6%) in 2012. This rising trend is much more dynamic than among doctors, where the share rose from just under 30.9% to 34.2% over the same time period (Fig 1).
Fig 1
One main reason behind this rapid growth of dentists is the financial benefits. According to profesia.sk [1], the largest HR portal in Slovakia, the monthly salary (in 2023) of a dentist is around 5 000 EUR (approximately four times the average salary of 1 304 EUR [2]), creating a huge gap between their salaries and the average Slovak wage.
With the strong financial security coming with being a dentist, the number of dental students in Slovekia has increased dramatically since 2010 (Table 1). According to Employment Institute (IZ) data [3], there were 514 dental students, across all grades, in 2010; this rose to 664 students in 2022 (an increase of nearly 30%). These figures only cover students with Slovak nationality and exclude foreign students (around 280–300 annually and stable at that level).
Table 1
According to Igor Moravčík [4], the president of Slovak Dental Chamber, the problem in Slovakia is not the number of dentists, but their non-proportional geographical distribution. This is confirmed by IZ, as according to their analysis [5], there are 78 dentists per 100 000 inhabitants in the Bratislava (capital) region, which is much more than other regions (for example, there are 38 per 100 000 in the Nitra region) (Table 2).
Table 2
