Immigration of dentists and its effects on the dental profession in Hungary

There were a very remarkable ethnic and demographic shift in the social composition of dental health care providers in Hungary after the collapse of the old regime in 1989. Hungary is surrounded by states with large ethnic Hungarian minorities blocked in their free migration up to the late 1980's. Although the non-educated members of the Hungarian diaspora did not leave these areas in mass numbers, a great number of highly educated people (among them preeminently health care professionals) moved to the mother state mainly for economic reasons. Dentistry comparing to other medical professions has a special financial advantage because of the considerable share of private financing in the Hungarian dental business. Unfortunately, no statistical analysis was made on the impact of this professional migration in the last 15 years. The present article based on a cross-sectional survey conducted at the end of 2004 demonstrates the proportion of immigrants (mean 7.81 %) among the total number of dental health care providers (5670 to a 10.2 million population) There are 2764 area bounded solo practices contracted to the National Health Insurance (NHI), the other 2907 professionals are engaged in the free market business, and/or they are public employees of the universities with dental faculty as well. As expected, the share of immigrants is higher in NHI-practices, but it varies in a wide range (1.9 - 23.6%) amidst the different counties (19 units plus the capital). Nevertheless, the immigrants may also participate in the free market segment of the dentistry. The variations can be explained by geographic, internal migrational and local economic reasons.